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!!

Creative Stitches and HobbleCrafts Show

Thought I’d do a bit of a post about the Creative Stitches & Hobblecrafts Hobbycrafts show that visited Brighton Centre this weekend.

I read a really funny post here about how the average age of those attending was about 80, so I thought I’d add my thoughts to the pot. 
Now, please don’t get me wrong: I love little old ladies.  I fully intend on being one quite soon.  

What I can’t cope with is flocks of them, all shuffling very slowly into a bottleneck of indecisive inactivity.  I have the same loss of patience in supermarkets (when I’m not helpfully reaching for stuff on the top shelves) and on busy pavements where I often find myself trapped, at the height of Christmas shopping meltdown, by their stealth-like pincer formations.

But I digress.


About 50% of the stands were devoted to papercraft and scrapbooking, and a lot of it really ghastly.  Sorry.  I like paper more than the next (wo)man, but some of this was super tacky.





But, there were some lovely sights along the way, like these giant knitting needles (they had some glorious shawls and rugs on display) beautiful hand dyed wool (but oh so expensive!) and some creative bundles of Fat Quarters.

There was also this glorious glitter stand - I wanted to scoop up handfuls and throw it into the air, like fairy dust, but they were only selling it in tiny little packets for £1 a pop.  I resisted.  

The high spot was the exhibition area - there were some great examples of embroidery and some quilting here.  

The first section was a “Glimpses From the Sixties” competition

This was absolutely superb!

the petit point stitches were no bigger than a couple of mms!

Liz Taylor in Cleopatra!

There was this lovely piece too:

the detail was simply beautiful!

Beer Today Gone Tomorrow by Maggie Danks

and some really fab dyeing and stitching:

Daisy Chain by Jenny Rolfe

My favourite part was a little mini exhibition of corsetry 
- check out that bunting!  Knickers!?  Genius!

	<---- self portrait with corset made from bras!

So, all in all a fun few hours, but ultimately I don’t think I’d go again unless I needed something like a new ruler … (more of that another day!)

 The problem wasn’t the little old lady brigade at all.  It was the lack of any evidence that ‘modern quilting’ exists in the UK, either on the selling or exhibiting side of things.

The lady at the Quilter’s Guild stand admitted that she had no idea that there was a quilting community on this here interweb.  I was aghast.  She asked me if I wanted to write an article about it for them, but then informed me I’d have to stump up the £37 annual membership first.  No thanks, not just now …

But my ultimate high spot of the day ??



Oh yes!  Impossible to find here in Brighton - and now I’m on an applique melt down … Yay!

I am so so happy to be a part of a wonderful online community - thank you for stopping by and taking the time to leave me comments and support along the way.*  

It means so much more now I know just how difficult it is to find this on my own doorstep!





*Talking of which … make sure you pop over here to Flutter Kat’s and stay in touch with this great week of posts … there’s some great stuff being discussed …