2012 - tying up loose ends...

Happy New Year to everyone!

I hope that everyone made it safely into the New Year, our celebrations were not specatcular though the boys and a friend on sleepover enjoyed the sparklers and were calling various magical spells to no avail - the weather has hardly improved and so I feel like I am keeping caged animals rather than children at the moment...

 



"2012" - the first thing that came to mind was the round birthday coming up this year - I am getting old... Anyway, that's still quite some time off. 2011 was a year of many changes, oldest son started at another school in Y7, he was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes in March, I changed jobs after Easter and was luckily offered permanency from 2012. The work is rather challenging, but less time consuming than my last position, so I hope that overall our family (and my quilting!) will benefit from more free time. 2011 was also the year I ventured more into 'home making' things. When were we convinced and by who that we had to buy everything at the shops? We have been baking our own sourdough bread for 9 years now, and I ventured more into making preserves last summer. Cheese making has been on my to-do list for at least a year, and in 2011 I learnt from books how to make Mascarpone, Ricotta, Mozzarella and Gouda:

Sourdough Starter - looks, smells and tastes yuck but helps make nice bread:-)

Curdled Milk for Mozzarella

The finished product - 350g Mozzarella from 3.8l milk, and it took less than an hour

I also ventured into cleaners, made my own dishwash powder and my own woolwash (and in the process of using it clogged up my washing machine...). Most my recipes come from other people's blogs and I keep on loosing the addresses and recipes, so I have decided I will add another page to this blog to keep track of them there from 2012 (resolution no. 1?).

As the weather has been so sh... and due to some new purchases and presents we have done various furniture re-arranging and shuffling. As part of this I tidied the wardrobe in my sewing room and discoverd that I have 10 projects in varying stages of completion. I have already reduced this to 9 (handstitching the binding does not count, does it?) and worked on two more, so I can tie these loose ends up (resolution no.2!). These are some of the things I have been working on over the last little while:

A couple of my little bookcovers I made follwoing Ms Lottie's tutorial - by far not as decorated as hers as I simply fuzzy cut motives I liked

Had to make another doorstop, our house has polished concrete flooring and a large gap between floor and bottom end of door so I needed to make a bigger one (the other one went to my sister for xmas :-). The weight of the gravel would have been too much for the bag, so I added some styrofoam packing chips as well, they keep the pyramid tip up. Works well, though I could imagine adding some rubber to the bottom to keep from slipping should the wind blow harder.

My first ever quilting project - a crazy quilt kit from Spotlight in Hamilton. Very cheap, and very poorly done by me. Might have been cut with scissors, seam allowances are all over the place, but I managed to complete it, use 34 of the originally 40 blocks and cut them 1/4' smaller. Sashing some Moda I had in my stash, and the backing is an old sarong - not ideal but the quality goes with the rest of the fabrics. Was fun to get it done after 6 years; will live in the lounge as lap quilt. Will post another photo once the binding is done.

Pinwheel Table cloth - started last summer and planned as seat cushions for the deck. However, Northland sun is too harsh and despite applying a sunscreen-like product the matching table runner faded. Yet to back and quilt.

Mortimer has been completed an now lives in DS' bed with the three other turtles. Dino Quilt has the remaining 5 LCBs cut and will get pieced soon (tomorrow?). Now I just need to keep that momentum going...

Just to keep myself on track here: Resolutions for 2012 are to keep a decent record of my home made recipes, probably on this blog, to tie up loose ends = finish WIPs before strting (too many) new projects. Sounds doable?!

Happy New Year to everyone!