Surely my head is going to explode!!!

It's been a busy old time around here, my first school holidays in a long time I have to work through (deserves me right for leaving my teaching job you might say!). Juggling the boys between DH's shifts and my working half-days plus Oma babysitting them for a day while trying to keeping the oldest boy's BSL (blood sugar level) under control - they always go crazy when he is not at school. Add in a 4 day trip to Hamilton (only 380 odd km one way - on NZ roads this takes me 5h) and yesterday my middle DS turned 10:

The Birthday Boy

Henry the Hedgehog (icecream cake for breakfast...)

His slightly crazy 12y old brother (well, what can you expect with this mother lol)

His still 7y old younger brother with birthdayboy's cat Tigger

10y old boys can be so complicated!!! You wouldn't believe the dramas we went through in organising his 'party': In our house you get a birthday party with games and things up to age 9, and you are allowed to invite as many children as your age, e.g. @ age 7 you invite 7 friends, @ age 8 you invite 8 friends - you get the drift. From age 10 you get to invite a few (no. is negotiable) and get to do sth. special, e.g. go to the movies and McD which is bday boy's chice for this time. He wants to see Diary of a Whimpy Kid Dog Days which only runs at Whangarei at the moment (about 90km south). Ok, we can do this. Then his best friend rings up, he will have a movie night / sleepover as an early celebration for his 11th birthday, on the same Friday afternoon. Now bday boy sees no other solution than having these two events clash and therefore neither of them taking place (more or less). He has eventually accepted my solution of going to the movies int he morning (with best friend) but while he wants to give said friend the present, he can't see himself going to the movie/sleep over (yet). Mother is slightly exhausted - and there I always thought boys were easy?!?!

Sewing therefore has been a bit neglected (and DH has pointed out repeatedly that the veggie garden needed work) but I have had another play around with those Quiltlet Cards:

I didn't like the look of that zigzag around the edges, so I took it out again

Looks better with binding, but would look even better with tighter binding!

With card attached - the card was very light, will have to find sth. better for this

I used Leah's FMQ from last week for this quiltlet, I think this is a good way to get the practice in and try out different designs with a purpose. I followed Helen's advice about using fusible and lighter weight card (except my card was very light). There is a lot of potential, but I will keep on working on this!

Last but not least: My QD9 To the Power of Four has been accepted into The Big Quilt Show at Northart Gallery in Auckland!!! Surely my head is going to grow so big that it will explode (if it hasn't yet from all the other stuff that's going on lol)!!! And even better, Suz's half log cabin at the Beach has been accepted also, so I see a trip to Auckland coming up early November to conincide with Auckland Festival of Quilts (formerly calico Christmas). Hopefully Rona from Layer upon Layer won't be (wo)manning the eftpos machine all day long so we can have a catch up!

I have a lot of ideas what I want to start next, but I  leave you with some pics of what I have back up on my design wall, would love to have this finished as a Christmas present for a teacher colleague:

Disappearing four patches (D4P) - just another 80 or so to go...

Happy Sewing!

Quiltlet Greeting Cards

I visited Catherine Parkinson's blog the other day, she is a very clever and creative person! On this post she talks about making quiltlets from leftovers. As I had just finished Pastellation this was an ideal chance to use up scraps and spend some more time with my long suffering DH who is sick of my hiding behind my sewing machine for hours on end while still doing some sewing :-)

For a trial I made three simple quiltlets and mounted these on cardstock tonight. It was a fair bit of trial and error, but there is potential - what do you think?

Points to consider: Size; binding - on the quiltlet only (jandals) or around the quilt and the card (feather), how to mount to the card (in all cases I stitched them on the card at some point.

Still here!

Some blogs I have come across seemed to have just suddenly stopped at some point in time, but no, I am still here :-)

Work has been busy, last weekend was taken up with heaps of fun at Jeannette DeNicholis Meyer's workshop in Whangarei - have a look on the Kerikeri Guild Blog for some more on this - and things have slowed down a bit on the quilting front. Sadly (in my opinion) autumn has arrived, so I have just bottled some pears, and the quinces are simmering as we speak. I have enough preserves already, and since oldest DS was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes one year ago today, our consumption of them has decreased a lot. However, I can't stand it to see the fruit go to waste and then buy tinned fruit from say China in the supermarket instead, so I will continue to make good use of what the orchard has to offer!

Jeanette's workshop was very interesting. I like making a mess, and I didn't mind at all cutting up my painted silk pieces. At the same time I bought some white cotton sheeting off Miss Lottie, some of it was used as drop cloth and looks quite interesting now,  and I intend to try my hand at dying as well as screen print some in the holidays. Working with the silk was interesting and challenging - it was amazing how the colours changed when you changed the order in which you placed fabrics on top of each other! Today my lovely mum gave me her Silk Organza so I will try my hand at this again some time - I have plenty left over from the workshop but I want to have another at some of the techniques we used to use for painting silk scarfs back in the 80s (remember the wet colours running into each other, or what marks rocksalt left on it?). Can anyone tell me if this works on Silk Organza (feels stiffer than what I remember the scarfs were)? The two challenges I find are that silk is slippery (...) and I am worried about washing it. Any advice? I also want to see if I can transfer this technique to cotton muslin if I starched it to the point that it would lay flat?! Anyone has tried that before?

Design decisions...

Finished work - it turned out all deep and meaningful in the end, the patterned background provided a grid to free motion stitch my childhood "Das ist das Haus vom Nikolaus" pattern - a house you draw in one continuous line. I continued from there on like a pathway which led to more houses - some small, some big, some wonky, some straight. The path rarely moved in a straight line, symbolising the pathways we take in our life, some times zig zag, sometimes going around in circles but no matter always on a journey. Over the top I raw edge appliqued yellow stepping stones leading who knows where?

Detail of the stitching

In the meantime, I am still slowly feathering my way through the QD9 - up to block 6 of 16 at the moment (if I want this to become my finish for March I better hurry up!). I also need to find a donation for school fundraising - Suz is finishing a lovely quilt top for it this year, she had made awesome placemats last year, so I am looking at placemats this year. Gathering up the various ideas I have read about and played with lately, I am planning to make it 'whole cloth', reversible, with a curly feather with 3 branches and tight stippling in the background. I hope this works on cotton batting - I felt that was the easiest to wash (well, at least in my house they need regular washing!).

Fossil Ferns + Moda - will it work?!?!

 

Another little idea I am toying with is a combination of the technique used to make my boys' faces, painted silk, small scale and the birds Wendy over at Sugarlane Quilts had photographed recently. I used a photo of one of the boys' 15 (!) budgies, sketched it on cotton organdy, layered 3 pieces of painted silk on top. From the back I stitched the lines through the layers and using my snips I carefully cut the top layer away where I wanted to show the middle layer, and both layers where I wanted to show the bottom layer. When I get a 'round-to-it', I will find a suitable background fabric (or paint one) and applique the body on, with paint / thread as beak, legs and the twig it sits on, a bead for the eyes. Postcard size. Now imagine actually posting such postcards (in an envelope) and make it a postcard swap?!

Be careful with those snips, I cut through the green on the left there! Mystifuse should fix it ;-)

Happy sewing!