Beth Millner

Needing to go to bed, but I have just finished a bunch of correction and we are in the closing scenes of Ocean's 12 on TV ... so a quick blog post is what is needed to round off a wonderful weekend where I got the opportunity dress up and chat with lots of old friends.

I came across this etsy shop and I love the stuff that Beth Millner is doing. Isn't the bee gorgeous!

When I buy jewelry it has to be hard wearing and it has to last more than a season of wearing. I like modern pieces that have a classic edge to them. Victoria Mason is an excellent example of a Melbourne artist doing what I would call timeless pieces. Her name is definitely on my Christmas List this year.

I spent far too long on Beth's blog tonight looking at her ideas and posts about her creative process. I love the way she shows you the different ideas and techniques that she has used in preparing her jewelry.

The Strawberry Lovers series is unlike anything I have seen elsewhere. I am not sure if something like this would suit me, but it is lovely anyway!

I done jewelry bead work in the past and enjoy putting pieces together, but I would love to learn a bit more about silver smithing and silver casting.

Am I a frustrated "wanna be" screen printer

I started making baby wraps when I discovered that there wasn't anything out there that I liked. Having a girl, I was inundated with pink when Tori was born.

So, I sourced some good stamps from various scrap booking stores and off I went. The first few attempts didn't work out too well and it took me a few go's to find ink that worked well with stamps and also washed well in the machine. After lots of trial and error we found some fabric paints that worked well.

The Buzzy Bee was my first stamped swaddle and I am still making them for others. I guess I am frustrated "wanna be" screen printer ... I still look for stamps that will work and put them together in a unique way to create one off baby swaddles.

Here are some of my most recent creations, they are still not finished. I am deciding on the colour of edging to go around the outside and I have to wash and press them for etsy, but I thought I would share. Firstly, robots ... I love robots ....


Secondly, Skulls and Bombs (not sure if this one works well). Will probably do a red edging to this one.


Finally, inspired by my husband who likes to play with toy tanks .... the Tank wrap ... I am doing a Burgundy edging on this one I think (or orange?), what do you think?

I want to get a hold of some black fabric as I think that the designs would work well on black as well. Especially the robots stamped white on black ... or maybe I should get red fabric. Potential, potential!

As for the screen printing ... one day ... one day!

Quilt for Wigglesworth

I finally finished a baby quilt I had been working on. I was hoping to have it finished last Sunday for the baby shower, but the universe clearly wanted me to take my time with it. The new parents to be have the quilt so now I can talk about it.

When I walked into my local patchwork store last week with a sample block, the lady in there teamed me up with some teal coloured backing fabric to go around the quilt. But when I got home I re-thought what I would be backing the quilt in and decided on the black and white. It was more "me" .... less old lady quilt. I'll use the teal to make something else for someone else ...

I started off with the freebee "bee" embroidery file that I downloaded from Secrets of Embroidery, and when I was happy with that, I downloaded the other bee's. I love bee's and for an unborn baby when I don't know the gender, bee's tend to go with both boys and girls.

I was laying out the four bee blocks on the kitchen table wondering whether to make another two bee blocks, when my daughter was watching Playschool and they were singing the "bee" song, so I thought I would work that into the design. I have Embird on my workroom laptop, so it was quite easy to do the writing in the font I wanted.

It is probably cheating doing most of this by machine, rather than by hand, but I am rather happy with the overall result of the quilt. Of course, it is a protoype, so mistakes mistakes, but I won't tell you what they are!

Baby wraps

I can't believe that it has been almost 16 months since my little girl looked like this ....


... it just seems like a distant memory when I look at this in the back seat of the car!


She has been the constant inspiration for many of my sewing adventures as of late, and about 6 months ago I pondered the idea of hand stamped baby swaddles. I hunted out a stamp of a bee and thus the "Buzzy Bee Baby Wrap" was born. I have made a handful of these swaddles and they have either been gifts or I have sold them to friends.

But over the last few days I have longed for an inner harmony and I found myself again wanting to stamp fabric. Reality is that I would also love to screen print, digital print and do all sorts of things to fabric (ooh!) ... but we are going back to work in two weeks time :-(

So ... I have been busy hand stamping baby swaddles and I have finally uploaded them onto my etsy store. I am selling them for $30 AU or $21USD per item. They are all hand made and the fabric dyes survive a 30 degree warm wash quite nicely (although it is always better to hand wash in cool water for prolonged life).


Lets start with the most radical wrap. Reactions to the Black spiders web wrap at the Northcote Christmas Market was quite interesting. People didn't quite know what to think of it! (And yes that it my daugthers life sized newborn that her Oma gave to her)

What do you think? A bit too black? I wish I had this when my daughter was born! Maybe the white version looks better?


This White spiders web wrap looks clean and crisp and works well over the pram on a hot day as well!

Then I started playing around with cherry blossom stamps and came up with this.

The pattern uses a really cute little cherry blossom stamp as the eye for a skull! I'd love to develop this idea a bit more and get some fabric printed off through Spoonflower.

Then I started thinking of how mothers actually use baby wraps. And yes they start off as a swaddling tool and then they end up over the pusher to help the baby sleep. So this one has snaps at two of the corners so that you can do that easily.


Phew! What a long post. Kick on over to my etsy store and check out the other things that I make.