Christmas 2010

Just some images of Christmas 2010 to share. My camera skills are still not brilliant with this camera, but I'm getting there and hope to improve greatly in 2011 (if I can ever find a course to help me!)

This was a Christmas where I made all my gifts (except for those for my brothers and a few things for Flâneur).

My mum got a doorstop (as requested):

Dad got an apron in brown and white linen, with his initials appliqued on the front and very long straps (so he can tie it round his middle at the front), but I forgot to take a picture of it. Oops!

For my sister I made a case for her portable DVD player. Going to great lengths of deception to get the dimensions from her (I asked what sort she had so I could recommend it to a friend, heh heh heh...):

I got the fabric in Purl Soho in New York when we were there in April and thought it would be better than the boring black case she had for it. More cheerful!

I have three nieces who are 1, 4 and 7 who enjoy helping out in the kitchen, especially with baking, so (after consultation with mum and their mum) they got little matching aprons, made out of fabric I bought yonks ago to make them something with! At last it came in handy... They're double sided (because I find that easier than hemming), and each had their initials embroidered on them so they know whose is whose:

I also made a wee gift for Flâneur's mum, who happens to quite like Tablet...

Hmmm... sugary. And so much of it!! But I was reliably informed that it went down rather well.

Other gifts that I made that I managed not to photograph included a book cover and i-pad case for Flâneur himself. Although seeing as they reside in our flat I will take pictures of them at some point. Particularly the i-pad case which I was particularly pleased with. It might warrant a whole post all to itself.... ;o)

As well as presents I also made a Christmas garland of little birdies, based on a pattern I had found in Scandinavian Needlecraft by Clare Youngs. Rather than the white felt she makes it with, I decided to go with what I had, a rich burgundy and dark grey:

Each birdie is embroidered, and it was a great way to spend my snow days from work in December!!

Flâneur also did some making this Christmas, mostly of the food variety, including some yummy scrummy gingerbread men. We don't have a traditional cutter for gingerbread men, however we do have cutters for German stop / go men (you know, from pedestrian traffic lights!), which he brought me back from trip to Germany a few years ago. They made very cute and a bit different gingerbread men...

(Not sure he's going to be so happy with that second picture...)

We had a lovely time at Christmas itself, eating too much, drinking too much and generally enjoying the time off. There was still a little snow near my parents' which made for a lovely walk on Boxing Day...

And so that is it for another year and 2011 is already upon us. I hope anyone who still reads this had a lovely Christmas and is looking forward to a fabulous New Year.

Quilt Along update

Having cut out all of the pieces last week, this week's task in the Fat Quarterly Quilt-Along was to piece it. With 80 blocks to sew, not small feat! I had meant to do a little each evening, but after a trip to the gym on Monday evening left me knackered I was slow to start... I then got a cold at the end of the week, which saw me taking two days of work, so no chance for sewing then either. Boo hoo... I had matched up all the fabrics into their blocks at the start of the week, deciding on a random approach. Well contrived random (as Flâneur put it), as I went to great lengths to make sure that a border fabric wasn't used as the centre fabric for any of the borders made of those fabrics. Hmm.. convoluted. Basically I tried to make sure that over all the 80 blocks I never got the same pairing of fabrics. Tricky, but I managed it!

I think this took me most of Monday or Tuesday evening to do! It was tricky trying to make sure the fabrics went well together whilst not repeating the pairing - and some I'm still not entirely convinced work... No doubt it will look better when it's all finished.

I was feeling better yesterday so I decided to take that as a signal that I should start the sewing. I was still pretty tired after the cold (they tend to hit me with major lethargy regardless of how severe the cold actually is), so only managed to sew 28 of the blocks. Which is pretty good going really. As the next stage starts tomorrow, however, and I didn't want to get behind, it did leave me with the hefty task of sewing up the other 52 blocks today! Phew! Still, the weather was typically Mancunian (rain, rain and oh, more rain) so I had no intention of leaving the flat anyway. So I chained myself to the machine and set myself a sewing. And this was the outcome:

A neat little pile of 80 pieced blocks. I'm pretty pleased with them, especially having never tried this style of patchwork before. Here's a picture of a selection of them:

I think you'll agree that some look better than others, and that some really do mess with the eyesight:

The two top left and one bottom left are among my favourites and some of the ones that I think work particularly well. The other three, well, let's just say they'll take some getting used to! I think the whole thing should look pretty good when I'm finished though. Fingers crossed!

Because I want it...

It is no secret that I am becoming increasingly obsessed with fabric. In a way that Flâneur is about paper (particularly Japanese paper), only I like to think with more commitment at the moment. My stash isn't that big, but it is growing. A trip to Liberty here, a Festival of Quilts there, so many online sources and an obsession grows and grows... I might even start blogging about some of the lovely stuff that I buy so you can all appreciate it too... I'll start when my Saffron Craig parcel arrives - so excited about that!!

While reading the blogs of friends I also read the blogs of quilters and other crafters (in an attempt to motivate myself, which does work sometimes) and from here I often find fabulous fabrics being promoted or mentioned and the drooling starts again. One such occurrence at the moment is on Sarah Fielke's blog The Last Piece. One of her recent posts was just a sea of fabulous fabrics that she has designed and had just had delivered. Oh my but it's lovely. And now she's giving some of it away.... Oh please let one of the lucky people be me... If it's not, well, maybe I'll just have to buy some of it anyway (if my paltry budget allows), as it's so pretty... I have one of her books 'Material Obsessions' and the other is on my Amazon wishlist, but to have some of her fabric too would be brilliant.

Keep your fingers crossed for me readers!

All cut up and ready to go...

The diet can take a back seat for the next few weeks (I'm bored bored bored of it). I am mostly going to concentrate on the sewing project. I am still trying to lose weight, as ever, and still logging all the eating and exercise, but it just bores me to talk about it at the moment. On the sewing front, joining a quilt-along, I have realised, is fantastic motivation not only to do more sewing, but also to do some fabric/sewing related fun in the evenings and not just at the weekend or on a day off. Hurrah, just what I hoped.

This is week 1 of the quilt-along and that means cutting up the fabric. Something it often takes me some time to get round to plucking up the courage to do! But I have followed the instructions and my lovely Moda jelly roll (Hello Betty) is now ready to sew:

(The lovely jelly roll bought in New York on our Honeymoon 1)

(All the pieces cut up - 12 2.5 x 2.5 inch squares and 8 2.5 x 6.5 inch rectangles in each fabric)

I'm loving the colours, the teals, the reds and browns. Hmm... lovely! (That dark solid colour is brown, by the way, even though it looks black).

I think I need a bit more practice with my camera though - it was new before going away in March and I still haven't quite got the hang of it beyond auto shooting. It was a total lust object, an Olympus Pen EP-1 , a micro four thirds interchangeable lens, retro beauty. Ideally I'd like to do a beginners digital photography course so I can learn (in a class room based environment) how to use all it fabulous features, but I am scunnered by there being no such course in central Manchester. I don't want to rant, but this town is so rubbish for interesting evening classes. The art school has decided that it's too good to do that sort of thing and the local college is only interested in getting you back into work. What happened to learning for the sake of learning? Honestly... If we lived in Didsbury, there might be more going on, but that's a half hour bus ride from us, and after the train ride back from work I don't want to then head off somewhere on a bus!

Anyway, so I need to practice more at the moment, at the very least. Meantime, roll on next week and the start of the sewing!

Holiday sewing projects

(Warning - lots of pictures in this post!)

Have just had a week off and as well as spending one weekend in Edinburgh and one in London, I also spent a little bit of time doing a little bit of sewing. I finally got the quilt for H and CMcM's wee one finished (I only started it, what a year ago??):

(The finished article, laid out on the table.)

This is only the second quilt I have every made, and the first one that I have actually properly actually quilted. I'm still not confident enough to do binding yet - hopefully with the next one, but I think it looks ok without it. I love the colours in this - always a wrench to give it away! I stitched in the ditch to quilt it, which helped keep my lines straight, but not always very straight:

(Spot the slightly wobbly lines...)

The back was a single piece of teal fabric. I'm pretty pleased with it all in all. :o)

(I quite like the squares on the back caused by the quilting, as well as the colours!)

(The final item, all nicely folded and ready to be given to the new owner. I hope she loves it as much as I do!)

I also made myself a ring pin cushion. I saw some (frankly much more finished versions) at the V&A quilting exhibition, which were lovely but £35, which was really just a bit too much for me to pay. After a wee search online, I realised that it wouldn't be that hard to make. All I needed was a bottle top from a 2 litre bottle of coke or lemonade (Schweppes in my case), some stuffing and a bit of fabric and some elastic (and some glue) and I'd have a rudimentary version.

(Not bad eh? Can you guess where the little fabric scrap came from for it?)

To really finish it off I ought to cover the bottle top itself in fabric, but that's perhaps something for another day (and I sort of like it in its raw state). Anyway, it's very very useful. And anyone who doesn't have one, should - they're so easy to make!

And then, finally, I made one more project. We've needed a new door stop in our flat for our bedroom door, since we moved in a couple of months ago. I have a great pattern from a Lotta Jansdotter book Simple Sewing, that I have used twice before, so I broke it out and a cool bit of fabric from my stash that I was just waiting to know what to do with. I mostly stuff them with soft toy stuffing, but then add some rice at the bottom (in food bags) to give it the necessary weight. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out though:

(Loving the funky fabric)

Here it is next to the other two that I made:

(They look cute all lined up, eh?)

The robots on the right was the first one I made - a present for Flaneur for Christmas a few years ago - and I clearly went crazy on the stuffing as it looks very 'comfy' next to the others! The chickens was used in the kitchen in the old flat. Unfortunately the freezer leaked a bit once and it got a little wet. I use it in my 'utility cupboard' now (the cupboard in the hall with the washing machine in it - it's great to keep the cupboard door open so I can use the blinking thing). I'm pretty pleased with my little family of door stops. And I think the last one I made is definitely technically the best.

Just need to work out what my next project is going to be now!

Fabric

One other little post today. I received (thanks to Flâneur going down to the sorting office for me), a little bundle of fabric that I bought last week from Quilter's Cloth. It's 8 half meters (Lily Pond by Wendy Slotboom) and I just had to share as it's just fab (images not best quality, but hopefully you get the idea!):

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it yet, but I do love it, it's so cute! I can't wait to come up with a project to use it for!

Quilt...

Well, the exercise has been taking a bit of a back seat these last three weeks or so, which is pretty shocking.  Never going to lose the next stone if I don't get back to it, so will be back at the pool tomorrow, snow willing!  Well, that's a bit of a hope really, because although it's snowing quite heavily now, it's unlikely to get so bad as to stop me getting to the pool tomorrow, this is Edinburgh, not London!  I did try and go swimming this week, but was hampered by the queueing system at the Uni pool - they only let 30 people in at any one time, so if you go at a busy time you have to wait.  The queue was too long that I decided to try again another time.  Monday's are particularly bad apparently, so I'll just go back to my usual pool tomorrow.  

I do love the snow though - I am like a small child, getting all giggly and excited by it.  Was very jealous of all the snow down south.  I live in Scotland surely it's supposed to be worse here! 

Anyway, what I have been doing in the meantime, while not exercising, is starting work on my quilt.  I bought the fabric in the middle of last year to make a patchwork quilt and it has taken me this long to finally get round to doing anything about it.  The fact that I had to cut nearly 200 pieces out was probably a big factor putting me off...  It's an Amy Butler design and is her 'brick path' quilt from her fabulous free patterns she puts on her website (www.amybutlerdesign.com).  As well as liking the look of the finished design it appealed because I thought the structure would be easy for someone who has never made a quilt before and who is still getting to know her sewing machine.  I picked some fairly muted colours for the quilt, mostly creams with some goldy colours, but just to make it a bit more interesting there are some really nice reds in there too.  

It took me several weeks to cut all the rectangles out (mostly because it was as tedious as I had imagined it to be and back breaking stuff), but it was a fairly impressive stack of bits when I was done... 

That's them all stacked up after I undertook the mammoth task of laying them all out on the floor to work out where they should go.  As there were, I think, 7 different fabrics and the quilt is 11 rows by 18, it was important not to get two of the same piece of fabric next to each other, and also to make sure that it has an element of the eclectic about it, so that it doesn't follow too much of a prescribed pattern.  I'm very lucky that our living room has a big floorspace so I could undertake the laying out exercise being able to see the full quilt and get a sense of what the finished piece will look like:

It's a big old quilt being roughly double bed sized (it should be 72" by 72" when finished).  I pretty pleased with how it looked laid out on the floor (it took several hours to complete that).  Here's a close up of some of the fabric:

I'm particularly fond of the bits with birds on (you probably can't appreciate them in the picture), but love all the fabrics and how well it will go with whatever bed linen I put on the spare bed.  Our spare room is also the fiance's study, so anything to make it less of a work space when we have visitors is a big bonus!

I completed the laying out stage two weeks ago and now am on to the sewing stage!  I have so far completed the sewing up of the first 9 downward rows, sewing the short ends in each row together, creating 9 long strings of fabric.  I'll not sew the downward rows together until I've finished them all, but it's nice to see it starting to come together already.  Very excited to see the finished thing!