Lucky Lucky ME! - Urban Home Goods Swap -

Oh, I do love a swap!



What I always forget is that, after all that toiling and worrying about what you’re making for someone else, something delicious arrives in the mail that someone else has agonised over, created, crafted and MADE FOR ME !

As part of the Urban Home Goods Swap on flickr, the lovely Amy (bixandbee on flickr) sent me this wonderful sewing machine cover, all the way from the mountains of North Carolina! 



I am utterly delighted - I feel like a proper seamstress now!  And Damiel the boy racer machine has the choice of being in touch with his feminine hexie side (above) or donning the go faster stripes that also suit so well (below)



You’ll notice a little scrappy bookmark there too … I’m going to need it as I make my way through this fantastic International Quilt Festival mega mag … swoon!  If only I could get hold of magazine-a-books like this here in the UK!  Thank you Amy.



Really, truly, from the depths of my thankingness, thank you! 

Lily’s Quilts - Quiltalong - A Dresden Platter of Deliciousness

 

You all know Lynne at Lily’s Quilts, right?  My quilting crush on her started when she made this beautiful Penguin Books quilt for her very very lucky sister:
 

Then, there was this little beauty on the DQS10 swap on flickr (not just for the beauty of the quilt, which I absolutely adore, but also for the hours of hilarity in the discussion groups … you had to be there)



… and then most recently, Lynne made the fab Hexagon Park quilt for Moda Bake Shop, using Aneela Hoey’s fab Sherbet Pips:



Well, now that Lynne is practically quilting royalty the upside is that we have a wonderful QuiltAlong to take part in … see her post here and the Lily’s Quilts flickr group here

I’m s-o-o-o-o-o-o-o excited about this!

• I’ve been dying to try a dresden plate for yonks
  
• Each block is QAYG (Quilt as You Go) which I’ve also always wanted to do!
  
• It’s the dreaded circle piecing & there’ll be plenty of people to hold my hand. 
  
• Oh, and did you see that concentric circle quilting?  Yup, we’ll be doing that too!

I’m actually only going to do one block, as a mini quilt/cushion [pillow] cover or summat like that … but that’s just because I really don’t have the time to commit to a whole quilt at the moment …

I’ve also always wanted to do a colour wheel, so here are my fabric choices:  YAY!


Just what I need!  A little colour to take my mind off a stinking head cold and a generally grotty demeanour …

So, if you want to get involved pop on over to Lynne's blog or Lily’s Quilts on Flickr and come join in the fun!


ooooh ... and don't forget you have til midnight Tuesday (UK time) to enter my giveaway for some Flea Market Fancy  !!

The 365 Project & A Little FMF Giveaway - Dumbell & Tulips

If you want to scroll down to the Giveaway bit, feel free, but you’ll only have to scroll up again … mwahhahah!

Since Valentine’s Day I’ve been taking a photo a day and posting it here at the 365 project … I’ve tried to make a point of not photographing too much stitchy stuff, but bits and pieces inevitably creep in …

Here’s how March is shaping up - (I set myself a little 7 day colour challenge this week) - It’s good fun and I like the discipline of a tiny daily task.  Click on pic or link in sidebar to go to my project page.




So, onto the giveaway …

Why now, I hear you squeak? Well, I meant to have a giveaway to greet the new year, but I missed it - then I planned on having one when I got to 11,111 page views, but I missed that too …  and now I’m nearly at 12,000  … coo-err!

So, before I get bogged down in any more swaps/quiltalongs/custom orders (more about them soon) I thought I’d just do a teensy giveaway to greet the slow but sure green shoots of spring.




You could be the lucky winner of two fat quarters of FMF  -  Dumbell & Tulips in brown - I know it's not a giant haul, but it could just complete someone's stash eh?




I’m also throwing in another FQ (things are nicer in threes) of a Michael Miller fabric that I love but just can’t find a use for!  The brown is so rich and the quality is just divine.



and last and probably least (!) a little frivolous item I’ve been dying to make for ages ….



If you want to have a chance of winning 3 FQs and a little something silly made by me please pop on over to my 365 project page and leave me a comment on any picture that grabs your eye …


I’ll do my random org-ing based on the comments THERE but if you leave a comment here TOO then I’ll count that as a second entry … easy peasy eh?  Feel free to spread the word :)

*edited to add: sorry, I didn't realise that you had to signup to 365 in order to leave a comment, so you can just browse my pics there and leave your comments here if you don't want another web-based thing to  get inovlved with !

Entries close Tuesday 15th March midnight my time, here in jolly old Brighton … Good Luck!

and yes, of course, I'll post internationally !

the serendipity of foraging in random forests …

When you go for a walk in a forest the first thing you probably notice is that there are a lot of trees.

As you walk a bit longer you might start to breathe in the smell of fresh or dry leaves, turned earth, of grass, of mushrooms.  Then you start to notice particular trees, they might be imperious; tall; short; teenage and sapling; arthritic and dying; proud; weedy or just plain misfits in the scheme of things.  You soon realise that the path you started to follow has long since disappeared.  You have been navigating by sensory instinct rather than compass.

I find the same thing happens when I have the time to go on a little web wandering …  I will often follow a link from a comment, which leads me to link upon link upon link until I find something that gets my solar plexus and I have to stop a while to catch my breath.

This is what happened when I discovered Leeds based designer-maker, Mr Finch. The first thing I read was this post back in November about a 19th Century Miner's canary, so I started to follow.







I’d been reading his blog in lurk mode for quite a while until he posted this about inspiration, and then I just had to de-lurk.

Then I saw these sleeping foxes and I fell hook line and sinker!




So I asked if he could make a smaller one - and look at this!



… trouble was, I’d already bought this beautiful moth from Mr Finch's Etsy store so it will have to wait until next month now …

they are so delicately made and look just fantastic on the wall …

Finch is making a lot of moths at the moment!

but he also makes wolves and moons and birds - these are his latest:

weeping trophy heads:

.... and he loves a bit of moss!





So, I urge you to go for a wonderful walk in the forest with Mr Finch. It can be a little dark and a bit frightening in fairy story kind of way, but it’s one of those blogs you want to start from the very beginning and read through to the present day … Enjoy!

If after that you want to buy a little something to mark the day, do visit his Etsy store …

all pictures (except the single moths) from Mr Finch's blog page

Urban Home Goods Swap? Tick!

Hey blogsters, sorry for my absence, but I had one of those weeks …

No, really,

one. of. those. weeks.

Monday started off with me being ranted at and then the week continued with me ranting a bit meself, sulking, despairing, crying, feeling remorse and then feeling angry again. I also ate a lot of fizzy sweets, had a crash and burn sugar hangover and finally lost myself in some sewing this weekend.  It took a long while before I wasn’t unpicking everything I’d sewn, but I found the unpicking strangely therapeutic, as if I were slowly unravelling the crap of the week.


I had to finish my pieces for the Urban Home Goods swap, ready for posting deadline today!  eek!

Now, I’m pretty sure my swap partner isn’t likely to drop by here (she was pretty invisible on the flickr group) I know she’s a very busy mum, and as well as being a fab maker of things and she also works as a bleeeeep (just in case you're here stalking. partner) , so she probably has very little time for the interweb!

Luckily my lovely partner sent really good likes and dislikes so I was just able to get on with stuff.




 
In the Urban Home Goods swap you make one large item and one smaller one.  There was a request for some placemats for her boys so I made these:





I had to strategically place stuff where her boys’ initials are to put in the flickr group, but here they are in full:

They were a bit of a big deal for me, as I really haven’t done any applique since I was about 13 - so that’s quite a 35 year knowledge gap LOL … as a result there was a lot of huh? what? and f!~#@! goin on …





Lots of firsts too - I used freezer paper for both outer and inner plates, using the famous “pin it, iron it, sew it, remember to leave a gap, grrrr, unpick, remember to leave a gap!, poke your fingers in and pull the blighter out” technique …


By which time I deferred to bondaweb for the cutlery.  I also made up the little aliens to match the fabric pattern and bondawebbed them in too … The main fabric is a lovely natural Essex linen, with a super deep green silky gingham on the back … I didn’t use any batting in them, so they’d be more floppy, and I made them quite large so that the kids can use them on their laps for a picnic.


My second item was a pot holder - my lovely partner said she loved Denyse Schmidt Hope Valley, so I made her this:

This design has a little pocket so you can get a better grip.  It is padded with natural batting and insulbrite so with any luck it should protect against burnt fingers!  I used this great tutorial here at prudent baby, and I love the quilty wrinkling it’s got goin on … 

I’ve never made a potholder before and what with the whole pocket thing and two types of binding making, I reckon I could’ve made a doll quilt in half the time LOL!

I know the stitching’s a bit wibbly wobbly, but I’ve been having some tension issues, LOL, probably mirroring my week again! …  but it’s strong and I think it looks much better in the flesh than it does here … or at least I hope it does!

So parcel’s in the post partner! Hope you love using them as much as I loved making them!

Look at all those stamps!! I love the eyeball ones, but the Remembrance Poppies are my favourites!

So that’s just the Make Mine Modern Swap left to go … I’ll be echo quilting those leaves - thank you for all your helpful comments - the way things worked out this week I didn’t have any time to practise the old FMQ, so it will have to wait until stress has been replaced by calm

… in the meantime, have a lovely week :)

Spring Has Sprung & Tiptoeing into the Unknown

While I was cutting out all the leaves for my Make Mine Modern Swap on Flickr, I thought it would be fun to do a little stop frame animation while I played around with where to place them ...

… so, I wrapped my little gorillapod tripod (such a brilliant invention!) round my uplighter and off I went …

Several (about 60) shots later I then imported them all into Windows Movie Maker (it’s a free program that you’ll find tucked away in your program folder) found a public domain birdsong track here and voila!

It was good fun … I’ve also taken shots in reverse to have them all landing on the ground, for an autumn to winter video, which I’ll take a little more time over at a later date …


Anyway, back to the sewing - Next, I fused and appliqued them all on (drat, how dull is that!) and then brought all the thread ends to the back (double drat, even duller) until I ended up with this:



Just a little embroidery left to do and then the batting and backing to baste.

This is where the tiptoeing into the unknown comes in …  As this is meant to be a wall hanging I could leave it completely unquilted but I thought I might have a bash at some FMQ now that Damiel is back to full health … Luckily his full speed is vrooooooooooooom so I think he’s perfect for this kind of thing.

I had a little go earlier today (I’ve never done this before with a fully working machine!) and this is what I got after about 10 minutes of mucking about on a practice piece … From what I’ve gleaned off the intertubes it seems you should pedal to the metal but move the fabric relatively slowly … ?

(excuse the rude drinks coaster bottom left!)

Here’s my dilemma - I really really don’t want to muck this up, as I think it’s looking just how I wanted it to … but I was thinking maybe just a bit of echo quilting round the leaves? Or shall I leave it?

- Any tips and suggestions would be really welcome - Here are some things I’m really not sure about:

• tension - tighter or looser than normal sewing?
• stitch length - I’m assuming you set this to 0 or 1?
• any tips for getting good loops? I seem to be ok in one direction but not the other - they end up being a bit squared off

And finally - do you like my new look?  I had a bit of a tidy up and cut the side columns down to just one on the right … I wanted more room for pics and less clutter … I’ve also amalgamated my static pages in the tabs above, to make room for some stuff I have planned …

Hope all is good wherever you are today … and please leave me some suggestions re. the FMQ if you have the time !!

A Lovely Weekend

I hope you all had lovely weekends - I had the joy of two days sewing with my lovely friend Barbara, who managed to scurry away from her busy family life in Cambridge for the weekend.  

Barbara and I first met as work colleagues (she oversees all the training for the UK, and she’ll hate me for saying it, but she is a truly wonderful person to work with) but we soon bonded over all things stitchy and crafty too.  We are now good, good friends and we’ve been planning a weekend of sewing for about a year!

I thought it would be cool if we both tried things we’ve never done before, so I showed her the string pieced half square triangle I used on my sew fresh fabrics bee block and then plonked my scrap basket in front of her … and off she went!

First came some practice blocks: 



then came an idea for a little cushion for her daughter’s room:







 
Then, just as things were going so well, Mrs Singer threw a sickie, and her attention to tension disappeared utterly.  Screwdriver, toothbrush (to clean the tension discs) and a bit of swearing later, I suddenly remembered the old ‘if in doubt, change the needle’ tip and then Barbara was back in business.

In the meantime I had a further bash at my swap item for the Urban Home Goods Swap 






… but if I showed you, I’d have to kill you …






… and then I moved on to try something entirely new to me - paper piecing a block for the circular geese colourwheel block … I’ve long admired these and never thought I’d be able to do one, but as that was the whole point of this weekend, I bit the bullet …

I spent a while tracing the template from here at Piece by Number and a lot of time reading (and re-reading) the tutorial from here at The Sometimes Crafter (it’s ace!)

side note/nerd alert:

I run a paperless classroom, and this has infected my home life too - I don’t have a printer, so when I need to make a template for something I use my laptop as a lightbox - just tape tracing paper to your screen and off you go! - cool eh?  Does anyone else do this? 

(Obviously, I have a solid screen on my laptop, you wouldn’t want to do this with a soft squishy one!)

By using Ctrl +/- you can scale up and down your screen size … it’s a quick fix but it works for me …

So, I ended up with lots of these:




and then I went through an agonising hour of Huh? Duh? Whaaat? Ah Yes! Got it! Huh? Duh? Whaat? * repeat until brain has fallen out of ears.


Eventually producing this (don’t laugh!):




I’ve strategically cropped the bottom as I was using scraps and the lemon print wasn’t big enough to line up perfectly … I did this just to see if I was up to it.  And I was.  But the first two pieces were so bloomin mindblowingly Huh? Duh? Whaaat? that I was unsure if I’d ever move on to piece 3, let alone all 9! 

I will definitely come back to this block.  Once I got the whole spatial awareness thing I got quite into it, and the satisfaction was huge.  I just need to make a real one not using flimsy calico and (s)crappy bits …  I was determined to finish so that I’d have some sort of muscle memory of making it for next time!

I also decided that next time it would be a lot easier for me to not have to guess the size of the pieces  - all that flipping from right side of paper to wrong side did my head in - so I’ve cut the pieces out from the template and when I try this again I’ll cut roughly those shapes (with the seam allowance) first … that should take a little of the guesswork out.



Then I moved on to my piece for the Make Mine Modern swap:



I got the trunk drawn, cut, fused and (now) appliqued, and the leaves cut, ready to fuse … but more of that another day …

For the last image, let’s go back to Barbara and her finished cushion cover! 

Her happy face just sums up the immense fun we had this weekend - I hope we don’t leave it another year before the next one!

Etiquette for Modern Bloggers - my turn!

Hope you’ve all been following this fantastic week of guest posts hosted here at Flutter Kat’s

Well, today, I’m guesting over there - talking about copyright and other sticky subjects!  Yeah! Me?! 




I’m really excited because it’s my first guest post and I so enjoyed doing it - even if it does go on a bit LOL!




Thank you Kat for inspiring such a fantastic week of blog reading :)




Have a lovely weekend chaps - I’ve got two days of sewing with my lovely friend Barbara … Double Triple Quadruple YAY!!