Hello Betty .. I need ideas!

I got myself a Hello Betty Retro Jelly Roll and a layer stack a few weeks back and I have done some squares for Tori's Paintbox Quilt, but I want to use the rest of it to make lovely quilt of teal and rust colours.

So I have been crawling around the net during my work breaks looking at what everyone else has done ...

via TLC Stitches

I love the way this quilt does the whole zig zag stuff, although if I did it I would probably do some sashing around the outside of the quilt.

The back of the TLC quilt looks lovely, I love the way they have put the solid squares up the centre of the piece.

I love this table runner, the colours look great. Candice mentions in her flickr stream that she used a charm square pack for this project. Don't you love the way that she has eloquently used ric rac!

via daffodilhilltoo

Misocrafty on Flickr also has a great coin stack quilt on her photostream that looks great and was made from some honeybuns ...

This is a lovely "sampling" creation by on-cherry-sew. Perhaps I ought to consider one like this if I can't make up my mind!

via Gayatri"

Another gorgeous Zig Zag quilt. This blogger pointed me towards a web site which show you how to do a Zig Zag quilt without the pesky triangles ;-)

Does anyone in bloggy land have any other ideas? I have a jelly roll and a layer cake in these colours.

Guess what this is!

My very talented father made this for me, can anyone guess what it is?

Made from an old pair of nail grabbers (not sure the technical name) and two plates of stainless steel.

Easter Hunt 2010

I'm slowly "processing" the pictures taken by my camera over the last few weeks .. finally an Easter post ...

Easter Hunt at Tante Chrissy's house ...



I found one!



What strange plant is this?



Basket is full, another one please!



Thank-you Tante Chrissy for the wonderful Easter Hunt day

One year older

Over the Easter break I celebrated my birthday, one year closer to 40 ... so for my birthday, I got to choose what I wanted to do. I had wanted to go to the Daylesford handmade market for ages, so the decision was easy! There was also a whole heap of Melbourne people at the market, so many excuses to go!

So we spent most of the day up at Daylesford, went to the Makers Market and zipped in and out of the patchwork shops and various antique bazaar's that Daylesford has to offer. Tori got to taste her very first strawberry milkshake.

On the Sunday I got lots of lovely things for my birthday. From a great collection of books ..

some fabric and some some new crochet hooks from Mum and Dad.

My hubby even got me some fabric from one of my favourite Melbourne textile designers, Shannon Lamden aka Aunty Cookie.

I have to restrain myself from going into my sewing room and playing around with fabric and blocks from Japanese Quilt Blocks by Susan Briscoe, that the lovely Beky gave me over lunch last week.

I love the way that she has broken down the construction of the blocks into a visual diagram. I am definitely a visual learner.

I am generally not one for navy .. but indigo I like! I am going to have to hunt up some nice indigo fabric for some Japanese blocking and some Sashiko embroidery samples.

Isn't this quilt just gorgeous?

A larger car play mat quilt

Getting close now ... I think that I like the size that it is. I will put a 2-3 inch sash around the outside to bring it all together.

Am I happy with it? Mostly, I am not happy with the way the checks sit in the shunting yard, all a bit wonky. But I am not going to un-stitch .. I have un-stitched enough!

I love the red section to the left of the quilt.

And I am rather happy with my corners, even if they are not 100%

Nearly there!

Car Playmat Revised

We took the play mat for a spin and found that it really needed to be a bit bigger.

If it is bigger than we can use it in the car as a blanket as well ... so I have played around with what it will look like with some more blocks added to it. I think that the additional colours will work better than the dull green overtone it has at the moment.

AND! I get a chance to do another corner (can you just feel my excitement?)

Paintbox update

I finally found a few minutes to sit down and make some more blocks for the Paintbox Quilt-a-long that I am meant to be doing. I am not quilting as much as I should be because I am busy doing writing and school stuff at the moment. My goal is to get it done by winter .. we are slowly edging towards winter and I am about 75% of the way through the "block phase".

I am WAY behind on where others are, but I will get there eventually! So here are my latest blocks, I love the colours (especially the middle one!) and I want to make a quilt full of these colours!

This is where I got the colours from .. look at these jelly strips! Aren't they gorgeous!

The colours come from the "Hello Betty Retro" collection from Chloe's Closet, a Moda Jelly roll. I recently got this jelly roll from Green Fairy Quilts, fast delivery, professionally packaged. Have you seen the Moda Bakehouse, a good quilting site to add to your RSS feeder.

Julie and Julia

I stole a few moments away the other night to watch Julie and Julia. Most nights the TV viewing only lasts an hour at most, but on that particular night I felt like sitting down to a movie and I knew what I wanted to watch. I had wanted to see Julie and Julia at the cinema when it came out, but it came and went a little too quickly for me to catch it.

via AllMoviePhoto

For me the movie was significant in two ways. Firstly the story is about a blogger and I could relate to that. Secondly, it is also about women re-creating themselves. Finding direction, satisfaction and passion in what they are doing, and I could definitely relate to that.

I love the fact that the internet gives us the freedom to share and involve ourselves in our passion like never before and it amazes me that schools are not taking advantage of this technology more (putting on my other hat). Yes they do "research" on the internet, but I would love for kids to be active contributors of quality content to the internet. Rather they use myspace and facecrack, and what do they contribute .. not much.

I can imagine this movie being studied in Year 10 English and kids are encouraged to start their own blogs on topics that interest them. Taking delight from watching their readership build up and the connections that they make with others, sometimes those connections will last a lifetime. Using the technology in this way is not expensive, but the school does have to unblock their firewalls to blogger. This perhaps is the biggest battle.

I tend to live quite a full life, some say that I do too much, others ask me how I manage to do all that I do. And I tend to respond firstly by saying that it is all smoke and mirrors and secondly, that I tend not to spend that much time sitting in front of the idiot box day after day. I would much rather be in my sewing room creating something than watching something on the box. Most of what I do watch is either taped (so I don't have to sit through ad breaks) or something rented/bought on DVD. I do enjoy sitting down to a good movie or crime show, but in general there are much better things to do than watch TV.

Blogging Links

While trundling around the net looking for sites on Data Visualization for another project I am involved in, I stumbled across a few posts of interest to us bloggers.

via Blogpulse, an interesting site which measures the "pulse"
of the blogging world. I find graphs and charts like this
rather intersting, although I am looking at it
wondering how it would translate into a sewing project ...

• Top 5 Blogging Misconceptions
• British Blogging: The Elements of Guyle- by Guy Kawasaki
  
• Tips for taking your blog to a whole new level

But how has this week been for you?

I've had a rather "average" week. A relative had a stroke last weekend and we have been coping with the aftermath and ramifications of that all week. So I am feeling rather drained today and I can feel a throat infection on it's way.

I have been trying to put in at least 20 minutes of patching a day as my stress buster, so Tori's car play mat is coming along and if I have the time on the weekend I am hoping to finish it off. She is itching to play with it and keeps on stealing it from my sewing room.

I hope that you all had a great week and that you get lots of chocolate leading up to Easter.

Testing the Play Mat

Like any good IT person, I like to test things .. why should a patchwork quilt be any different?

Once I sewed the four larger blocks together Tori and I walked the half done quilt through to the back room singing "build a city and a country".

It passes the "building" test. But I feel that it is still a bit small to meet her needs. Contemplating making it a bit bigger ... I'll have a think about that ...

The roads are big enough for her cars ... but she still wants traffic lights!