My Creative Space - Take Me Home

Here’s something that floats my pay-it-forward boat muchly … The Toy Society.

A movement that started as a little street art project in Australia (and is now international) The Toy Society operates on a beautifully simple premise: make a toy, put it in a bag with a note saying “Take Me Home, I’m Yours” and then leave it somewhere out in the big wide world for someone to pick up and, well, take home. 

I love it for its randomness and for the fact that it’s not through a blog (although you know I love a giveaway!) it’s out there … where random acts of kindness are oh so welcome.  It’s a way to rejoice in our humanity, rather than feeling ashamed of it, as we so often do.

Dropped: Newport Restaurant, Broomfield, CO USA
Number of toys:1
Made by: decapod
Dropped by: decapod
When: Nov 28 2010
And decapod says: corduroy double-headed tiger inspired by Chinese toys,
left in a stone lion outside of the restaurant
via

What I really really love it for, is that it is NOT seasonal.  It operates all the year round.  Even so, I've just signed up and I'm going to do some now.  What the heck! I thought I'd make one to cheer up my fellow teachers at work perhaps? ...  just nonchalantly leave something in the staffroom?

Which leads me to my real "creative space" for this week ... it's in my bonce, not my viewfinder I'm afraid ... 

I know we are all focusing on Christmas and our loved ones right now, but I want to plan for something fun to do early in our shiny new year of 2011. Start how I mean to go on. 

Once all this 'ere festive stuff is done and dusted, I’d love to run a Toy Society inspired swap in early January -  If we all made something, swapped it and then left our partner’s gift somewhere near where we lived, it could be kinda cool?   

I'd like to open it up to include gifts for grown-ups too ... so you could just leave a pincushion, or a teatowel, or a toy ...


What do you think?  Fancy a flickr swap in January? We could spread the lurrrrve? Please take a few seconds to leave your thoughts … there's a poll right at the top of the page, on the right - I'd love to know ... 

My Creative Space - 'Echino Patchwork'

 This great adventure is the first machine sewn quilt I’ve ever made!

can you tell what it is yet?

Whodathunkit?  Me, sewing a grown up quilt using measuring and everything!?

*Whooh-Whooh* welcome aboard the Chain Piecing Express … How much do I love Chain Piecing?  Heaps! What a brilliant trick …

I’m so enjoying the discovery process and really like the rhythm of 

one thing x a gazillion

followed by

another thing x a gazillion

All things considered, it’s going well … if painfully slowly - but I’d rather get things right and only do them once! … or twice … or … let’s just say the seam ripper is still my best friend. 

Longer post to follow once I get to that inevitable "I’m totally stuck” stage …

Hop on over to Kirsty’s for heaps of far less cack-handed creative spaces

My Creative Space - Happy Thanks-giveaway-ing

So, today’s the real Thanksgiving, eh?

Well, my creative space is brimming over with thankfulness.

While yesterday I was being thankful in low key reflective mode,  today I’m jumping about with much more cheery thankfulness:

On an entirely material level, I am thankful for Giveaways!  

Last night my return from work was greeted by a whopping amount of randomly generated booty from I’m a Ginger Monkey’s Scrap Vomit Technicolour Yawn giveaway! 


Honestly !  There isn’t a “Yay!” typographically big enough to describe my squeaky jump for joy happiness as I lifted the lid of a rather yummy brown cardboard box to reveal this not-so-little lot.

pic from I'm a Ginger Monkey

Wowza Katy, thank you so much! it was like opening a treasure chest!  I don’t think I’ve ever had that many new FQs in me mitts before. (Other than when doing a bit of furtive fabric stroking in shops, that is)  

I am truly thankful.  

-- Especially as one of the fabrics seems to be the key piece that brings together all my random thoughts about the (as yet still imaginary) quilt project ...

... Stay tuned … I think I may be onto something ... more pics another day …

I promise to pay it forward with a new giveaway very very soon - 

But until I do, there’s another fab giveaway over here at I’m A Ginger Monkey - it’s only open to the UK though  … but it’s for this fantastic stack of 19 FQs of solids, THE HURRICANE, from Backstitch - go check it out! - it runs until November 29th :)

pic from I'm a Ginger Monkey

Don’t forget you’ll have something else to be thankful for if you pop on over to Kirsty’s and take a while to immerse yourself in all that lovely talented creativity …

My Creative Space - Gadzooks! Christmas? Really?

Deck the Halls with Festive Hexies

fa la la la la la la la la

other increasingly festive creative spaces {maybe} here at Kirsty’s

p.s. you can enter my Melody Miller ruby star rising giveaway here!

My Creative Space #11

I’ve been off work all week with this dratted migraine/gastro virus, so sadly my space has not been very creative.  I’ve only left the house to go to the doctor, so plans have gone a little awry …






Have I posted my giveaway cushion? 
Nope












 

Have I posted my Scrappy {Hoop} Swap?
Nope














Have I posted my Pay it Forward giveaway?
Nope













Have I sat in bed and sewn a little birdie pincushion?
Yup










Ho Hum – thanks for popping by ... you can dock with the creative space mothership here 

- I feel another little sleep coming on …  see you in a day or two …

My {Nerdy} Creative Space #10 {Blogtoberfest #30}

My creative space this week has been spent entirely in the ether, in an attempt to have a bit of a template clean up and to organise my nerdy world a bit.

I’ve been wanting to change things here for a while, but haven’t had the time to sit and let my inner geek play with deeper stuff like code.  

I was so utterly physically exhausted after my trip to Cardiff & Bristol with 30 students (very slow walkers with no traffic sense!) that it seemed the perfect time to knuckle down and zone out in front of my screen.

I’ve embedded the links to where I found the nerdy tweaking tutorials/resources to save you time searching for this stuff.  If you want to cut to the chase they’re also in a little list at the bottom of this post!
So, first some blog de-stashing:

• Out goes the polka dot template from Shabby Blogs - lovely as it is, it was doing my head in a bit – I feel the need for more white space! They do have some lovely templates, buttons and winkies though.
  
• <-- In comes a third column to keep things tidy
  
  
• In comes a ME ME ME page - tab at the top - to keep the sidebars free for NOW stuff!
  
  
• In comes a new coloured tag/label cloud (using this great RGB colour chart – my top tip is to choose 2 colours that contrast strongly because then you get a better range of colours for frequency)
  
  
• In come much more flexible comments from intensedebate – I first saw this on The Coffee Lady’s blog and really liked it - now I can reply to your comments inline with them, rather than under the latest comment – or directly by email.  You can either embed it as a widget (which is easier but may make your page load more slowly) or straight into the template code (not that tricky – but save your template first!)

Talking of Dashboards - I use the Blogger In Draft dashboard – I never knew it existed but it’s so much better than the standard one, if you haven’t tried it … settings and stats are easily navigated through.

I’ve been experimenting with widgets that let visitors post links, so far I’m quite happy with this one at inlinkz, but I’m going to try this one at Linkytools next for more blog-hopping opportunities.

I’ve changed my Blog Reader - Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve always used Google Reader and I love it.

 
But with my current state of dodgy internet connection and less time in the evenings because of work or being on the go, I really need a reader that I can use offline.  

It took a while, but then I found Feed Demon …



Yay!  Love at first sight – you can get it to “prefetch” all your unread items (you can customise this really well so that it even saves links) and then you can read at your leisure … 

If, like me, you’re subscribed to what looks like the entire interweb, it takes a while to fetch, so my next geeky task is to start tagging the blogs I follow so that I can further tweak the Demon …


And finally, I’ve changed how I write my blog – for good!
My daily blogging through Blogtoberfest left me increasingly frustrated with how New Blogger resembles New Labour with all its broken promises … so, I’ve been trying out Windows Live Writer for the past couple of weeks – you may have noticed how much better the pictures are ‘sitting’ within the page, and how much more consistent things like line breaks are? 

I can’t tell you how much it sticks in my craw to rave about a Microsoft product, but rave I must! It’s a quick and easy download, you can import your blog theme (and all the tags) for accurate previews, WORK OFFLINE, save locally and upload to draft or publish, including publishing in advance. 


It allows you to do so much more than the conventional Blogger interface. Tables are a doddle, as are pictures, videos, hyperlinking and colours.   

I love it to pieces and I thank all the people out there in the Blogolopolis who gave it a go and good reviews for me to follow suit.

Honestly, if you just try ONE THING, give it a go! You won’t look back and you’ll soon forget all that awful clunky action on Blogger. It also has a word count! 

ahem … 846 words – time to stop!


So, that’s the end of my geeky nerdy round up – *phew* Thanks for sticking with it and I hope you find something useful!  Here are all the links again, without my gabbing:

• Shabby Blogs – templates, buttons & blinkies
  
• Coloured tag cloud
  
• RGB colour chart
  
• Comments from intensedebate
  
• Embedded links with inlinkz
  
• Embedded links with Linkytools
  
• Blogger in Draft dashboard
  
• Offline reader from Demon Feed
  
• Windows Live Writer

I’ll be back with some yummy sewing stuff to see out Blogtoberfest in style … 

In the meantime, why not take the new comments form out for a spin with your top nerdy/blogging tip, or tell me what you think of my new look? 

My Creative Space #9 {Blogtoberfest #21}

This week my creative space consists of stolen minutes at the machine (or at home, for that matter) in a rush to finish a secret squirrel birthday present!

shhhhh - It’s an apron in grey white & raspberry pink to match her rather fandabeedozee kitchen.

My Creative Space #8 {Blogtoberfest #14}

This week my creative space is a bit

secret squirrel pic from here

... because I'm all signed up for the Scrappy {Hoops} Swap* and I'm finishing off my Rainy Saturday in Brighton giveaway (you've still got until 2pm Friday - irrespective of time zones - and I'll draw the winner Saturday morning UK time)

*I will be giving you [my secret squirrel swap partner] a tantalising little peek over the weekend though ... heh heh heh ;-)

I've had such a busy week at work + all the other stuff, that I have a serious amount of catching up to do; I've probably sewn a total of 1 hr this week - marking sucks!

Hurry on over to Kirsty's for some much more public creative spaces though ...

My Creative Space #7 {Blogtoberfest #7}

a little sneaky peek at my Brighton Giveaway in progress

Today I'm going to start to decide which print to use for my Rainy Saturday in Brighton Giveaway

(you've got until October 15th - please go to original post to enter!)

 

This is going to be a pretty little project when it's finished - whatever it is!  

It's a way for me to practise my straight line sewing - so apologies in advance to the winner, who is bound to spy a few wonky lines in there! 

Yippee!  I love a new project - and I have a deadline to finish this one!

pop on over to see who's playing along with kootoyoo & showing off their spaces of creativity here

My Creative Space #6

This week was all about the OFSTED inspection

You know how it is sometimes? 

get up in the dark

go to work and teach teach teach

get home in the dark

sit in front of computer

work work work a bit more

take a break to check out amazing creativity out there in the teeming blogolopolis

eat biscuit(s) to make up for feelings of gross inadequacy

make pincushions
go to bed
(repeat)

Not exactly a wildly creative space, but at least it's not entirely blank!

these are for my lovely friend Barbara

For much more inspiring and less autumnally gloomy spaces check out who's been dropping in to share at Kirsty's

My Creative Space #5

 

So, the fun part of my creative space this week is still a little 3D obsessed!  These triangles are much more pesky (don't look too closely at that brown gingham one! - I've corrected it now) I'll show you when I've joined them all up - I want this one to be more angular than the dodecahedron ball ...

The unpicking featured in my post yesterday was to do with my other little project which had to be put on hold when Mrs Singer had her nervous breakdown.

 The sleeves had to be unpicked and re-sewn because of a weird 'one long one short' thing going on.

I haven't had the patience to sew them in yet.  That will be a little finishing project for the weekend, methinks. 

I'm doing the binding now for the neckline, but it looks a bit like a school dinner lady's tabbard, which is not quite the look I was after -  I may have to unpick that too and go for a plain  binding instead

Which colour binding do you think I should use?  

Purple?

Grey?










Dirty Pink?

Let me know in the comments section PLEASE!!! I just can't decide

My Creative Space #4

Let's keep things platonic, shall we? ...

mmmm ... back to skool this week (I teach IT, remember?!) hence the dearth of posts - it's all been a whirlwind of usernames and passwords and online course creation.  Whatever.

Anyway, during the summer my classroom was invaded for summer school, and while clearing out the cupboards today to make way for the new academic year, I found sets of platonic solid templates for the little darlings doing maths to cut out and make ...

I think the Dodecahedron and the Icosahedrons (illustrated here) would look really fab as patchwork platonic solids ... what do you think?  .... watch this space!

p.s. if you want a pdf of either
just leave a comment

I blame the Hexagons!

btw ... here's a peek at the rows I've been sewing (just because I can't bear not to have any fabric on here!):

... and don't forget to head on over here to invade more creative space ...

My Creative Space #3

This was the plan for a small pencil roll for my god-daughter.  An easy quick project.

I picked up the leaf fabric at Ikea in their remnant bin for £1 - yay!  The orange spots are from my stash, as are button & hair band!  I'm not sure if I'm going to use the ribbon.

So, all was going fine, stitches straight, mood elevated and then KAPOW!  I had an absolute ...

... DISASTER!!

My presser foot lever just decided to fall out on me - no visibly broken parts, so having to insert it by hand every time I need to raise the foot!  GRRRRR!!!!

<---- Looks like this may have to wait a while longer ...




Ho Hum ... don't forget to pop on over to kootoyoo for more creative spaces  (hopefully a little more productive than mine this week!)

My Creative Space #2

So, I've finally started binding the second half of my 'quilting as therapy' quilt -(see tabs above for the background to the story)  It just seemed to come to a natural stop so the embroidered quilting is quite randomly spread - I've also hand-tied with ribbon ... it's sad to see it finish, but it marks another stage in my grieving process, I guess  ....

Don't forget to pop in to some of the many inspirational spaces out there, as curated by Kirsty at kootoyoo ...