What's been going on...

Heaps has been going on, but somehow nothing seemed to get finished to a point where I felt like I have something I could show here. Earlier this month I took the boys to Hamilton and we had a great time catching up with friends!!! My lovely friend Carla is not only incredible smart (check out her site here, while I have not been to a church in a long time, she makes a lot of sense to me), she is also very creative and showed me how to make teddy bears. Tad-ah, today finally Johnny joined our family:

Am I cute or what?

Of course (!) there are already rivalries between the boys who will get Johnny, so I have bought two more lots of fur and I will make a few more. It's not necessarily something I would want to do forever and ever, especially because it's all hand stitched, but a few every now and then would be nice:-) Unfortunately, the process makes quite a mess, especially when I got to the 'shave around the nose' bit:

Might need camouflage pants for the next one...

Speaking of mess, I might have mentioned that I will teach screen printing at school this term. I went to a course a few years ago, so I completed a few projects to refresh my memory and remember the pitfalls:

I had photographed this upside down, so now it looks a bit funny :-)

The topic for this term is Tangaroa in the wider sense, so my idea is that the students pick a sea creature, print that in one colour (light green), in a second go they add darker details to it (greenish - grey) and lastly they cover what has been printed and print the background in a sea-kind-of colour. Had a great time experimenting with Suz from the All-the-good-ones-are-taken blog and I wish I had taken photographs of Nadia's pillow cases (hint-hint!). I have more pics of the process and when the mood strikes me might put a little tutorial together.

These are some I prepared earlier:

These plus some more will be used in a yet to be revealed way - I hope the person these are for does not read my blog ;-)

What else? I have quilted my first quarter of the pastel tessellation quilt with cross hatching; sewing together the backing drove me to distraction, it pays to cut your strips to length if you don't want to unpick HEAPS of them...

Looks a bit like a cot quilt for a baby girl at the moment...

I made use of the gazillion squares you get after cutting out the squares on the lean

The cross hatching was so simple, the distance from a corner to the middle of the square to the next corner was short enough that even I could stitch (fairly) straight lines, esp. with the walking foot (don't know if I needed it or not, I don't use it much really). Onto some more of this quilt in the near future :-)

I have learnt HEAPS from doing the Dinosaur Quilt which I will blog about in another post - family outing to the new Minigolf place soon :-)