A day or two or three late.....Finishes

Did everyone have a lovely Australia Day long weekend.  We went camping with friends and had a great time.  At our peak we had 16 kids camping with us, the kids had a great time with plenty of friends to play with.

Over the past week I managed to finish another book.  I never finish a book this quickly, but I do like this author, Matthew Reilly. Matthew is an Australia and writes great action books with a good bit of history.  My son gave me this book for xmas and was waiting for me to read it, I read it very quickly staying up late some nights to finish "this bit, I have to know how this bit ends".

 

I prepped the flowers for the applique borders I showed last post.  The flowers started out as 4 patches.. drew circle and basted around the circle

 

I then pulled the basting thread around a mylar circle from Karen K Buckley, and spray starched and press the heck out of it.




Removed the mylar when the fabric had cooled, they are now ready to applique.

Here they are all stitched down. Now onto the 72 leaves and 48 berries still needed for the borders.

The summer school holidays ended and off to school the kids went, kind of happy, kind of not. Every year at the end of the first day the kids and I go get ice cream and chat about their teachers, classmates and the school.  The kids love the ice cream

And here they are on the beach, we always do this shot.... love them kiddos




















Not much Finished this week, but progress was made.  I did get some binding done and will show that in another post with lots of pictures.

Have a good week everyone

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to everyone, I hope you all had a safe and enjoyable time with family and friends

I had a very busy time in the lead up to Christmas and so I really fell off the blog map... very sorry... so here is a summary of all that my family and I have done over the last weeks and weeks and weeks.

 

I finished this quilt for my daughter, it was a Christmas gift for her.  There was a few late nights stitching the binding after she had gone to bed. This is Felicity's quilt for the caravan.  She was very happy to find it under the tree.

 

 This little bag was made for an end of school year teacher gift.  We put lip balm, moisturiser and chocolates inside.  Felicity picked out the fabrics.

For my last customer quilt for the year I had a very large medallion style quilt that needed custom quilting on it.  Several days later it was finished and delivered. One of the many border had these 4 patches, so I did this cute little flower design that matched the applique shapes in the centre medallion.

 

Each year the local council organises a Christmas boat parade.  We took our dinner down to the park and sat and watched the pretty boats go by with many, many other people and shared and great night with friends.

 

With the kids on school holidays we drove to Brisbane and visited my sister.  The cousins had a great time playing together.  My sister makes glass beads for jewelry, this is Felicity learning how to melt the glass and create some beads.  I stepped out of the room and let Avril teach, I was making them nervous with my over protectiveness, that flame is very hot!!!!!  Felicity was so rapted with her creations.

The weekend before Christmas Hubby, kids and I spent the weekend in Brisbane doing the Christmas sights.  We looked at the window displays, they were not that exciting this year.  We walked to King George Square to see the Christmas parade followed by the Pantomime then the lights going on, on the tree. 

 

This year the City Council building was lit up by a new light show, this was a story being told by images moving all around the façade of the building but made to fit into the shapes of the building.  The story was a bit weird but the lighting was great.

 

 

This sparkly decoration was in one of the arcades in the city. I took a photo hoping my husband will make me something like this for next year..

 

 

 

The day after all the Christmas events we all went to the Queensland Art Gallery. The display was California Design, 1930-1965.  We all enjoyed it

 

An original Air Stream complete with wood panelling and chrome fittings inside.  Camping in this would have been very cozy.




This chair was part of the Design display, people were allowed to sit in the chair and invited to Instagram an image, Josh made himself comfy while there.

 

After the Art Gallery we went in search of a park to have lunch, we stopped at a set of lights, I looked out my window and saw this in a shop window.  Do you see the bead necklace, right hand side second row from the bottom, they are my sister Avril's beads and this is the shop she sells them from Artisan  So cool...

 

 

So then I had to do some last minute shopping and saw these snowmen hanging around.  I have confessed to you my THING for Snowmen, they looked so cool.  Well, last week I was in that shop and the snowmen had just been pulled down and were stacked up ready to be put in the bin.... well... I asked him nicely and was able to bring some of them home with me.... never too early to plan for next year...lol

 

 

This was my Prawn entrée creation for Christmas dinner, not much was left over, very yummy

 

 

My little sister, Heather, does the Ham each year and it is just heaven, again not much was leftover...

 

 

I think this was Boxing day or somewhere between Christmas and New Years.  The house was quiet early in the morning, so I did a little piecing. Do you see my polka dot pj's????

 

 

New Years eve was spent down at the beach, with friends, watching the fireworks going off.

 

 

New Years day was spent again doing a little piecing.  I have been working on Bonnie Hunter's Mystery quilt, Celtic Solstice.

 

 

 I found these in Woolworth's on the 2nd of January, and it looked like people had bought some already, OMG Easter is not until the middle of April.

 

 

A little more piecing was done, and still not finished....

 

 

The family went to see this movie and enjoyed it.  The Snowman made me laugh, but you are not surprised by that..

 

 

This year I have decided to find a word to follow for the year, I will let you know how it goes

 

 

Some cutting of fabric for more piecing >>>>>>>

 

 

And now that some of the verrrrry HOT days have passed I am able to get out walking again, in my new shoes. 

 

 

I got myself a Fitbit to help me stay on track, this is after that first days walk, nearly 5.5kms, happy with that.

 

So that is about all, geez that was a long post.

 

May the year bring you happiness, health and some time for stitching.

Fabric Ice Dyeing

Hi all

 

On the weekend my sister and I played around with  fabric Ice Dyeing.  We had fun.  My Mum and another sister were there also so as well as playing with fabric we had a nice day together.  Christmas decisions were made regarding food an secret santa, so a very productive day for all.

 

This is what the process looked like, we only knew enough about dyeing from the internet and You Tube, so in reality only enough to be dangerous.......

Here we are with fabric over buckets ready to be dyed. The buckets collect the water and dye as the ice melts.

 

I used two colours per fabric, as Kathy from Tamarack Shack suggested.  As the ice melts and the dyes blend you will get a surprise third colour.  This tub has Raspberry and Green

 

This one is a mix of Raspberry and Hot Pink

 

Turquoise and Orange

Cobolt Blue and Hot Pink

Now the ice has melted and the colours are revealed.  Cobolt blue and hot pink, this mixed so beautifully

turquoise and orange blending and creating a new colour, really like this mix

Raspberry and green was very surprising, I have bits of yellow in this as well

Raspberry and hot pink looked great here, you can start to see the texture being created with the subtle shade changes in the dyes.

The next day you can rinse and colour fast the fabrics.  Here is the  Blue and hot pink. This one has a purple tone to it with the mixing of colours. Happy with this mix

The turquoise and orange, love it.  Where the colours mixed there is a great burnt orange colour

Raspberry and hot pink, the texture is really cool in this one, very happy again

Green and raspberry, really cool texture and blending of colours.

 

These are all brighter than the pictures, I didn't have great success with the editing. Note to self, try to take time to learn better photo editing next year.  Along with more adventures in fabric dyeing..

 

 

Our family had a great day together and that was the bonus score of the weekend...

 

Love you family  XXOO

Lately.....

So this is some things I have been up to lately,

One of my clients, Joy, has a lot of candlewick pieces but already has a large candlewick quilt, so I am gradually turning them into cushions for her to give away as Christmas gifts for friends.  They are all lovely pieces.

Hubby and I went to a Melbourne Cup function at the local Racetrack.  These are my losing race and raffle tickets.  I did though have a couple of wins through the day and ended the day "in front".   It was a great day out with Hubby with the bonus of getting all dressed up for the fun.

This quilt belongs to Val B made for her daughter.  This is a large fun quilt with a very striking but simply pieced border. Val asked me to bind this one for her this time, there is 10.2m of binding on this quilt. whew all done and returned to Val in time for her daughters visit.

This one belongs to Sherida, a very lovely lady who does beautiful work.  This quilt is a mix of embroidery and applique.  We used wool wadding to add lots of texture to the applique.  All done and looking  beautiful.

This is part of the embroidery on Sherida's quilt.  Those French knots are very tiny. stunning.

 

We had a family lunch for my daughters birthday, this is dessert.  The cake was my second attempt.  The first cake turned out perfectly until I made a drizzle sauce with salt and not sugar and had to throw the whole cake out.  The ice cream is homemade also.  The dessert was a perfect end to a great family lunch.

 My daughter also had some friends over for her birthday, earlier than the family one,  on Halloween.  So dessert for the girls had to be something spooky.  I filled new and very clean flower pots with lime ice cream, sat a toy skeleton inside then topped with ground up oreo biscuits.  The girls were very happy with the graves. They then got all dressed up and went trick or treating and had a ball.

A couple of our Halloween decorations.  Yes the hand has fallen off but was fixed in time for the kids coming around

And finally some fabric getting cut up for a quilt I plan to teach in the new year.  It is coming together nicely and am very happy with the colours. I have used two Jelly Rolls from Moda, Happy Go Lucky and Summer House.

 

Off to the couch to stitch some hexagons together

 

take care