Good housewife

Well, I'm not really, neither good nor housewife for that matter lol. Anyway, my lovely DH and youngest DS have been coughing for a fortnight now and finally I got it. A week before the holidays. Yeah - not - well maybe still yeah, better than being ill in the holidays! I had just handed in another 86 reports on Thursday and Friday (on top of the 170 or so I had handed in a couple of weeks ago), so the pressure was gone and bang there I get sick! What this has to do with being a good housewife? DH has the week off because the school of oldest DS has an extra week holidays (they started earlier in than other schools in January) so naturally both of them were home, too. DH then asked if I could make a little something to keep our doors safe from the cats so as a good wife I naturally couldn't decline the offer to go quilting lol. A bit long winded way of saying yeah I got some sewing done today, aye?

We have four lovely cats. We have had cats for many years, some of them are silent, some of them talk, and often the smallest ones are the one that make the most fuss. Take Crystal, she still looks like a kitten though 3y old. When we watch telly at night, there will be a mighty bang and the door to the lounge nearly smacks into the wall from the force and in comes innocently ' Crystal'. With the heat pump going and the power prices as they are we don't like having the doors open for all the heat to disappear (as usual in NZ while our walls and ceiling are insulated - concrete floor - the windows only have single glazing and just lined curtains to keep the cold out). So this is my little prototype I made from more of my leftovers from my Stratavarious Quilt a few years ago:

I will try to get some black elastic, white was all I had at home. I think I might need to make two more, one from the bathroom, where the cat flap is, to the hall way, and one from the hallway to the family room.

In position on the lounge doors. None of the cats wanted to try it first, we'll see what they'll do tonight :-)

With still heaps of leftovers from the Stratavarious Quilt, I quickly made another cushion cover, too:

Bugger, I had taken photos of the progress and deleted them by accident! OOh, I think this pic is actually upside down, Blogger, what are you doing?!

If you look closely you might see Loopy Line quilting. It was on Leah's site recently, and I found it an easy and quick way to quilt the cushion cover.

Over the weekend I had blissfully ignored the children for a while and made progress on my other stripey project, using the leftover strips from the Stratavarious quilt (no, I am still not sick of the colours!). Now there is just the binding left to hand-stitch on:

I ended up with 20 blocks overall

Not much leftover of that original pile now!

This is the polar fleece backing I am using. It is a bit bluer than I expected but it seems to work well. Above some of the blocks, not pieced together yet - you can see where I had to fill in with some dark blue to make it fit

I have quilted it with big stippling and attached the binding but will stitch it on by hand. I'll post more pictures when I have finished it :-)

But now to some goodies I received - ATCs and some charm squares from Kat Bierma

Thanks heaps, Kat!!!!

Now wish me luck for my job interview tomorrow! I better go and make some preparation so I don't mess that up...

Happy Sewing!

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!