Blogger App Monopoly

So there I was, typing away busily in the Blogger app on my iPad. I did not go over Start aka press Save Draft and straight went to Jail - my beautiful post simply vanished! That should teach me - again...

So here we are, 5 months later, and it has been an incredibly busy 5 months. We packed up the house and belongings in Brisbane and moved back home to New Zealand where despite a rather dire rental market in the local community with the help of family we managed to get a lovely rental. While it only had 3 bedrooms (meaning the two younger boys had to share a room) and NO DISHWASHER, it was in a lovely, quiet neighbourhood with a beautiful view of the Kerikeri Inlet.

I was lucky enough to be offered two jobs and accepted a position as classroom teacher in an innovative, small, rural primary school about 45min drive from home. It has been an incredibly steep learning curve for me, this is the first time I have taught at this age level, and we had a number of changes to organisation and class composition during term 1 which meant lots of adjusting and putting in very long hours. Currently it's the school holidays, and we have been busy setting up a new classroom environment because from term 2 we will be team-teaching two year levels together.

The boys have settled into high school life incredibly well, even middle DS who had complained about moving to Australia in the first place and then complained when we decided to move back. All three attend the same local high school, have made friends, and teacher feedback is very positive. They are very lucky as their bus stop is the first one from school which means they leave after 8am in the morning and are back before 3:30pm. DH has been organising the household and boys and is job hunting.

We sold our previous home in Okaihau at the end of January, and as if life wasn't busy enough yet we did a little house hunting. We literally looked at only 3 houses, fell in love with the third, and when the bank gave us the go ahead, we bought this property. At the end of February we moved yet again - but we promised ourselves this will be the last time for a VERY long time. This new home has 5 bedrooms so - I have a sewing room / office again! Please excuse the night time shots:

My big corner sewing desk is up again, with the butcher block / cutting station currently to the left, and a handy pressing station on the desk.

The shelf sits to the right of the corner desk, and on the next wall is my newlarge desk which doubles nicely for laying out blocks - when there isn't too much school work spread out :) Note the furry helper!

On the remaining wall are two closets: The one further to the left (out of shot) is open with shelves (not organised yet), the other is this double wardrobe which now contains most of my sewing and craft items: Threads and notions tucked around the left, current projects and bags of scraps on top of the metal shelf, stash in the middle (that needs better organisation...), more material in the roller box (with space for my fabric painting box to the left), and some future projects below.

I've found it very tricky this term to concentrate on sewing for any length of time, but lately I've had a little more breathing space again, and with better organisation it's easier to pull out projects and work on them.

• Suz from All the Good Ones Are Taken and I are still working on our #VintageQuiltRevival Sampler Blog Exchange (much easier now with just 20odd km distance versus across the Tasman!).

Just a random layout for now; 11 down, 29 to go

• Still quilting the #GiantChevron - I'm a bit over it, it takes a looonnnggg time, and I still have problems with random thread breaking and stitches skipping; I'm thinking I need to really observe what I am doing to see what is causing this...

• Haven't looked at #OpalEssence in a while, but I think I might pull it out this long weekend, it's quite soothing to merely quilt shortish, straight lines...
• The blocks of my #MetroRings are still in need of getting pieced together. I can't quite decide if it bugs me that the curves aren't all even or not - might have to come up with a clever quilt ing design to make this work?

During my tidy up, I rediscovered a number of my quilts, so will get DH onto setting up some hanging space. Our new home as sarked timber ceilings, he was talking about using fishing line and timber rods - no more drilling holes in the walls! I also found a number of pre-cuts and little - or bigger - collections of fabric for future projects. One of them is Bella Solid bundle, themed around 'Postage Due' from Dowry by Anna Maria Horner.

My middle DS selected it as it reminded him of his beloved video games, esp. Super Mario. Originally I wanted to use lots of squares and rectangles for a pixelated effect, but after some discussions with Suz et.al. I'm thinking about some pluses, or maybe sth. similar to this?

I saw this block pattern advertised one someone's online store just recently but couldn't remember where. To find it, I did a Google Search for the image, and I had to laugh when the results was Best guess for this image: super mario bros 2 toad sprite

Another little find during unpacking was this beautiful damask from MiL's hope chest - she gave it to me 3 years ago for making duvet covers. I think it's very precious, and have been thinking about clever ways of using it. It's about 1.25m wide and there's about 7m of it I think; I'm wondering if I could use this to make a large 'cover' / valance for our bed to showcase smaller quilts on it? With a now California King (2x2m) even my 100x100" quilts can look a bit small.

Hmm, should have ironed it first...

Lots of things I could be doing - might have to tend to the washing first though! I hope you, too get to enjoy a happy long weekend of sewing!