Orange

It's the end of the month already, it's time to link up with Judy at Patchwork Times,  which means it's time for me to reveal my Monochromatic Challenge block for this month.

Ta dah!




Here it is, my goldfish (just in case you weren't sure).

Orange for April was another great colour for me, I had quite a few orange fabrics to choose from.  It didn't take me too long to make a decision on what to embroider either.

I am feeling a little weird just doing a block each month when everyone else seems to be able to finish a whole quilt, but if I had attempted to make a Monochromatic quilt each month, I probably wouldn't have even made the first one. At least this way I will have twelve lovely blocks at the end of the year that I can use to make a beautiful quilt.

Some more orange loveliness, photos of amazing orange sunset clouds, taken from my verandah this week.







The colour for May is red, I am worried I won't have enough reds to choose 8 that co-ordinate.  I love red shoes, red handbags, red coats, red lipstick and red scarves but I don't think I have very much red fabric that will go together.

Stay tuned.

Favourite Things Friday

Another Friday rolls around, the year is going faster and faster.  This week my favourite thing is some of my jewellery.
Not too far from where I live is the iconic Eumundi Markets.  Eumundi is pronounced You Mun Dee with the emphasis on the Mun!  Many people from all over Australia visit the Eumundi Markets when they are in the area. A while ago I found a lovely lady called Helen that made and sold the most gorgeous bead necklaces. Over time I bought a few from her.

 I absolutely love the unusual beads she uses.

The metal fish in this one is so cute.

Bitchypoo knows how much I love these necklaces so she bought me this red one for my birthday a couple of years ago, isn't that nice. Another cute fish in this one.

This last one I bought at another iconic place here on the Sunshine Coast, at Hastings St, I just love the details of this one too.

Pop on over to join the linky love of Favourite Things Friday and share your favourite thing with Shay at
Quilting In My Pyjamas.

My Creative Space

A little something I am working on in between, the Monochromatic Challenge and the French Roses.

If you'd like to see other creative spaces pop over to Kootoyoo to see lots more creativity.

Not Not Karma's quilt

Another finish for April.

The idea started when I saw the Max and Whiskers pre-cuts I thought it would be great to make them into a really cute dog bed for Karma.  I combined them with some co ordinating prints from my local quilt shop, the sashing is It's a Hoot from Momo.  Initially I called it Karma's quilt, really original name I know!!!   I thought long and hard to come up with that name.
As the quilt progressed though I thought it was way too nice and I had spent too much time on it to be just a dog quilt. So I was going to make it bigger and use it myself.  It became Not Karma's quilt. More hours of thinking to come up with that one!
After getting this far with it, I came to the conclusion, that the fabric was cute but I didn't want a quilt in it.  All my friends who saw it said I should give it to Karma and I was mean if I didn't, so now it's not Not Karma's quilt, dumb I know, but it's more interesting than just plain old Karma's quilt!


There are some really cute prints in this range, some of which I fussy cut.  I echo quilted it around the log cabin strips in a kind of squared off zig zag.

The back is chenille which was surprisingly easy to work with.




I pieced the binding using more of the jelly roll.



It's the first time I've pieced a quilt on point, and I had a little bit of trouble working out the setting triangles as I wasn't following a pattern.

I'm really pleased with this one and Karma seems to be pretty pleased with it too!

 I don't think he's too impressed with Lulu trying it out!

Pyjama Party Sunday

Easter, it means three days so far of playing in my pj's, woo hoo. Monday and Tuesday are looking good too. Although Monday pyjama playing will be interrupted by a family BBQ lunch at my parents house.

I have been playing and achieving quite a bit, for me, anybody else would have probably started and finished a couple of quilts by now!

I played with these.

I finished this quilt.

I worked on this.

I even realised that I had a tiny bit of wall behind the door in the study/third bedroom/fabric and wool stash room where I could have a design wall.........finally. So up went the piece of flannel that I use as a design wall and a bit of painters tape, voila a design wall.  If it works, I'll think about putting something up that is more aesthetically pleasing, in the mean time it is ok, even if it does look a bit crap!

Lots of playing with fabric. Always a winner when I'm procrastinating.  I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with the first bunch. No lovely neat piles of fabric for me, more like messy and spread out to see how they look.

It's funny, if you asked me whether green is a favourite colour of mine I'd say no, but look how much green is in the above two pics of fabric stash. I do think I'm partial to those light yellowy greens.  The greens in the second photo are going to be part of another quilt I'm about to start.  I have about 10 quilts on my to do list, but when I was playing with my fabric, I decided to skip all of those and start on something that I hadn't even contemplated doing. Oh well, at least I don't have to buy any fabric for this one, it's using up some of my stash.

 The weather has been absolutely glorious, so a fair bit of this has taken place too.

 Look at those beautiful blue skies. Normally at Easter the weather is 99.9% sure to be horrible, wet and grey, but as Easter is so late this year, the weather has been perfect. We stayed home this year, because Easter is so hectic on the roads, I went away only a couple of weeks ago, and we just love staying at home and hanging out, who wouldn't with this view.

I finished unpicking the circles of doom, now that was an achievement. I had to double check that I hadn't missed any as I really thought it would take me f.o.r.e.v.e.r to unpick those. Now to start quilting them.............again, sigh!

Take a look at this little pile. I've finally started English paper piecing. How cool is that. It was so quick and easy. It didn't take me long at all to do these. Not that I will ever attempt to make a whole quilt out of these, but it's something else I can do at night which doesn't involve much brain power.



Link below to Pyjama Party Sunday, so that we can see what fabulous achievements happen when you play in your pj's.
Remember you don't have to have been in your pj's, we're not going to check on you, but if you have something crafty or exciting to show please join in.
I'm off to play in my pj's for the rest of the day, I hope everyone is having a wonderful Easter break too.

Help

Please help with any ideas on how I should quilt this.

I don't really want to do stippling or meandering.

I've been searching on Flickr and everywhere trying to find ideas.

I don't want to send it to be quilted, even though that would be the easy way out.

So if you have any suggestions, keeping in mind my level of ability, please help. 

Is crap an official level of ability?

Finding motivation

I'm going to admit here and now that I am having a great deal of difficulty in keeping up with my projects. I have no excuse other than to admit that I jump from one thing to another and I take on way too many things at once. It has led to a bit of stress around Chez Sunshine, which is ridiculous because I'm not trying to solve world peace.
The more I have on my plate, the more I tend to ignore it, so for the last few weeks I've been putting off  all of my current projects, preferring to rearrange fabric piles, read books for more inspiration (which I don't need right now as I don't need to start anything else yet) or just do nothing at all.
The last few days I've been setting small goals, to see if that would help and it has made a huge difference. I still haven't finished anything but I've achieved quite a lot.

• Tidied up my rather substantial fabric stash which was lying on the dining table (purchases from the previous couple of weeks) taking up an awful lot of room.
• Quilted and sewn the binding to the front of Not Not Karma's quilt - I'll explain the name when I finish the binding, and have a photos to show, it just needs hand binding to the back to finish.
• Cut out all the background, batting, backing and flower and leaf pieces for the French Roses quilt.
• Quilted half a dozen of the blocks for the French Roses quilt.
• Put together a Dresden plate for Lily's Quilts quilt along.

Along with aiming for smaller goals I have been using essential oils in my oil burner, you may remember I wrote a post about my oil burners here back in November. 

I found the Motivating blend and I think it may have made a difference, even if it didn't it's made the house smell nice again!

Pyjama Party Sunday

Welcome to Pyjama Party Sunday.  I'm hoping this works, fingers crossed.

On more than the occasional weekend, Shay and I will stay in our pyjamas and work to our heart's content doing crafty stuff. Sometimes there's a lot to show and then quite a lot of the time we spend half the weekend on the computer, emailing each other, looking at blogs, commenting, and wasting spending invaluable time finding good stuff on the net.
I'm positive we are not the only ones that love to spend the weekend slouching about in our pj's, so the idea here is for anyone who has had a "crafty in their pyjamas" kind of weekend, even if you don't have much to show for it, or you weren't really in your pj's, (we don't need to see photos to prove it),  link your post here so we can all have a sticky beak and come and look at what you have been up to.


I have been in my pj's  pretty much all weekend, I needed a quiet weekend at home after the FUNtastic time I had last week. Saturday I finished the quilting, cutting and machine binding of Not Karma's Quilt, and now it's already to be hand sewn to the back.

I now have only 6 circles of doom to unpick,  last night I unpicked another two.

For my inaugural Pyjama Party Sunday I have been cutting, cutting, and even more cutting most of the day.

Ended up with a bit of a mess on the floor.

Finally finished cutting all the parts of the flowers for French Roses. This is not necessarily the final layout, it was just to give me an idea of what it looked like now that I have all 25 blocks completed. The two in the top left corner are the blocks I joined on the day of the class.

25 squares cut for the backing.

Next step -  to cut out the batting/wadding and make the quilt sandwiches, then on to quilting them, not today, I've had enough of cutting. Maybe onto the circles of doom again this evening.

If you would like to join in, please add your post to the linky thingy below.

Friday Night Sew In

Check out Handmade By Heidi for other FNSI participants.

Friday night, and I sat down with my seam ripper, a pair of tweezers and a pin, to start unpicking  10 "circles of doom" on the Champagne and Strawberries quilt.

It's the raw edge circle quilt, pattern from Cluck Cluck Sew that I started some time ago and began free motion quilting a few weeks ago. The original plan was for a circle pattern on the circles but after I started I didn't like it because I quilted it too heavily and I think I'm going to change the pattern to circles/bubbles within the circles, after all the quilt is called Strawberries and Champagne. The pic below is probably one of the better ones, I'm too embarrassed to show the worst ones.

I unpicked one on Thursday night and it took me an hour, that's why they are now nicknamed the circles of doom.  So Friday evening, four hours later, I had unpicked three more circles. I really really dislike doing this, but I'll dislike the quilt even more if I don't do it. As someone pointed out to me, now that I've unpicked four, I'm over 33% of the way through. At least I can do it sitting in front of the tv, not that I can watch the tv as I'm too scared that I'll cut a hole in the quilt top, but I can listen to the programme.

I took a break from unpicking and went through my stash to find eight orange fabrics for the next block in the Monochromatic Challenge. I've also picked out the embroidery pic for the centre of the block, sorry,  you will have to wait for that to be unveiled at the end of the month.

So not much sewing, in fact no sewing, but I made a dent in the number of circles to be unpicked and I'm that much closer to it being finished.

Favourite Things Friday

This week there are a few things I could choose for FTF - having a wonderful time with friends,  visiting a place for the first time and being shown around by a very nice and informative friend, visiting places that have autumn leaves that are turning the most beautiful colours, but instead it's going to be about something that Bitchypoo suggested, as it's one of her favourite things, and I think it's pretty darn good as well.

It's an egg topper.

Bitchypoo loves boiled eggs, but can't won't crack open the egg so always asks me to do it, and I don't like boiled eggs. In December I saw these in a homeware shop and even though it cost an arm and a leg, (if it had cost me a first born child it would have defeated the purpose as I wouldn't have needed it then), I thought it would be the perfect Xmas present for her.  She was very impressed and thinks it's fabulous and I love it because I don't have to crack open her eggs any more.

Bitchypoo took the photos and if you click on the last one you can see Bailey skulking, actually I don't think he's skulking at all he looks like he's quite at home on the kitchen bench in the background, hmm, bad Bailey. Oh and please excuse the crumbs, she hasn't learnt to hide stuff when you are taking photos to show.

How cool is it that she thought of something for me to do for FTF. Yippeeeeeee.
Hop on over to Quilting In My Pyjamas  to see and link up to more favourite things.