Common sense prevailed (for now...)

The Minister for Education made a u-turn and abandoned the proposed cuts to teachers - phewww. A number of other undesirable (at least in my opinion!) changes are still on the table, but for the moment at least the common sense of parents and the education community as a whole have prevailed!

At the moment I am so busy at work that I barely get to sleep at night from all the unfinished work floating around in my head... I managed to get through a few urgent items this week, but this weekend I finally have to finish the remaining 45 reports for term 1 (I haven't started on the 200 for Term 2 yet!), I have to prepare my relief work and make my presentation for the ICT conference on Thursday and Friday (yay, another short teaching week for me!)

But on to more pleasant matters:-) As I mentioned in earlier posts, I have signed up to the ATC swap at the Quilting Gallery, and by Monday I will have sent off my four cards to my secret swap partner:

For the front I experimented with different techniques I enjoy: Top and Bottom left were created using leftover scraps / crumbs, ribbon and lace spread onto 2 layers of cotton-silk batting, covered with wash-away fusible and stippled with variegated cotton thread all over. Top right was a piece of the cotton drop cloth from the Jeanette DeNicholis Meyer Workshop in March on 2 layers of man-made batting, quilted with interlocking squares, seed beads added, and Bottom right is a Diane Gaudinsky inspired echo feather on a piece of left-over batik with 2 layers of cotton batting (I used this recently for my ironing tote).

That orange bugs me...

I decided to use hand painted fabric for the back and printed some of my details on it (cut a piece of Freezer Paper to A4 size, iron to fabric of same size and feed through your printer - didn't work perfectly every time but I got enough usable pieces).

I was actually harder to work with in this small scale than I had expected! Satin stitching the edges was the biggest issue, my zig-zag stitch is not very reliable, I need to get the machine looked at... I feel quite self-conscious about these cards, in the end I stuck to things I knew - but then somehow that's what an ATC is about, it's about what that person does. I am not sure that they are up to the expected standard, but looking at my explanation of what I did it sounds not totally simple... I hope...

Other than that I need to get my hand printed fabrics finished for Leslie's swap, here is just a little glimpse:

Sun Printing...

... but the paint must have been too dry before I laid it out into the sun because there were few mark in the paint...

but this one that my youngest DS painted turned out a bit better - faint but visible.

I am not going to use this for the swap but if you remember the pics of the back of the ATCs, I cut that rain bow coloured fabric up for it :-)

Tomorrow I'll meet up with some friends for a bit of quilting at one of the local schools - thanks Suz for organising this!!! I'll take my Startavarious leftovers and make some more of those logcabin variations, will see what it turns into (I need a finish for June for Sew it's Finished!

Happy Sewing!