WiP Wednesday

So I've been a busy girl this week. Something bit me...I think it was the SEWING BUG!

Consequently the WiP Wednesday this week is going to be ALL COMPLETES! YAY!

A friend from my writing group gave me and Sel this panel a few months ago and asked for us to quilt it. She didn't want anything fancy, any patchwork or pieced backing, just to be backed, batted, and bound. I found a piece of Timeless Treasures crosshatch in a corresponding blue and we used a nice tiled yellow to bind it.

The quilting was an all over-stipple and it turned out with a nice drape.

And I really love the machine-stitched binding! It turns out Rita's tutorial was just the push I needed - I read it through every couple of days and then when I finally did sit down to do it, I managed it perfectly the first time, without using pins. That is pretty great for me!

I even had nicely mitred corners.

This is the last quilt with hand-sewn binding in my stash. I finished it Saturday at SCQuilters and was tickled pink to sit next to Kyishia who was also sewing a Sophie-themed cot quilt with blue binding!

I loved finishing this quilt. I love to look at it. It's also stippled and the colors are just perfect. It was a quick quilt to make and it made my day to see it come together.

*sigh* It's so beautiful. I hope Maggie loves it.

I like the back, too.

But Nikk's Winnie-the-Pooh panel quilt and Stepping Stones weren't the only quilts I finished this week...

I finally finished, and named, this bad boy. Caravaning. The stripey binding was a lot of fun and I love the way the eye moves across the squares.

And I finished Lolly Fields...it's very delicious! Dreamy and soft, just perfect for a little one.

Both Caravaning and Lolly Fields will be up in my Etsy store soon!

Now. For the quilt I am probably most proud of.

Last week I was suddenly inspired to make my mom's quilt. I bought and cut out the fabric on a Tuesday after deciding on a pattern. I chain-pieced, cut and trimmed, stitched and organized and added borders, then stippled like a madwoman. Piper was feeling much maligned as I repeatedly popped her up on the sewing desk, plunked a toy in front of her, and said "Momma's gotta sew now!" It was probably not a good thing I hurried through this, as she's recussitated the shrieking habit I thought we'd gotten past...my bad.

But it took a week exactly to get this quilt from go to whoa (as Sel would say)!

This is a big departure from my usual style but it's for my mom and I think she'll really love it. I've decided to call it "Tower of Roses". It's the first large quilt (75" square) I've machine-quilted and I am now convinced I'll never need to send my quilts out for long-arm quilting. My Bernina was a GREAT investment.

My mailbox was busy too. I got some delicious fat quarter sets. Like this one: Secret Garden in Midnight.

Pezzy Prints by American Jane. I stared at these for weeks before caving in and getting this set!

Echo by Lotta Jansdotter. I love it! This is pretty different to my usual but I am looking forward to the challenge of making something beautiful but outside my comfort zone.

And a fat quarter set of Heirloom by Joel Dewberry in the Citrine palatte. Oh my. Yes. All that orange and aqua.

I also had some fun on Spoonflower, picking up fat quarters for specific projects. How cute are these?

And then, a happy accident. I picked up the rest of the bolt of this yellow, grabbed the purple stripe for making bindings separately, and wow...looks good! I picked up some Kona Bright Periwinkle and Bright Pink to match: here's hoping I can come up with a plan!

I added a bit more to the Lark I've been collecting, and picked up a bit more of these trees. I want to make something out of it BUT WHAT. I'll leave it out & let it simmer for a week or two.

I really love these trees.

I'll close on this note. Piper has learned how to roll over...and how to scoot! She only goes backwards, though, which is hilarious. She goes so fast she surprises herself. She's gotten stuck under a few chairs, and once scooted right out of the living room!

Here she's helping me decide. What a good helper. I'm so blessed!

WiP for the new year!

Holy moly, I didn't realize WiP Wednesday was back! HOORAY!

I feel so much BETTER now with a pretty brown button...

...helping to keep me accountable!

So the big news is that I'm going on a HOLIDAY! Hooray, hooray, hooray! We're going to a little-known country called...AMERICA! Haha. I'm going back to visit my best friend and her two kids (her little boy I haven't even MET yet!) and then I'm going to my mother's birthday party. It is her 50th and even though we'd planned to go to the US in March or April once I recalled that this birthday was an important one, I rang her up to ask if she'd like us to visit. Of course she said YES!

Me being me means I want to get everything done before we go. Haha. Well. We'll see.

So what have I been up to, you ask?

ALL of these have been quilted and just need binding!

Super fun trying out stippling for the first time. I love quilting with Beryl. It's such a superior machine and it runs like a dreamboat. I have had so much fun with my BSR. I also began quilting pebbles but I think I am way too impatient to do those well. I'll post a picture when I finish that quilt.

On the eve of the new year, we watched Return of the King, and I sewed garden fence blocks. At last count I had 19/49 done. Well, I finished the last one at five minutes to midnight, just as Frodo got on the ship to Valinor. (Not a moment too soon. Frodo is SUPER ANNOYING. Sam's the man.) But I digress. I finished the blocks! I have 50 absolutely gorgeous garden fence blocks that just need arranging and sashing. I finished squaring them off the first day of the new year. So beautiful.

I have also begun saving all my stringy scraps for filling soft toys. It's so much nicer than hobbyfill and it gives me the incentive to square my blocks. Otherwise I would be lazy and sew them as-is. So naughty.

I have a few other quilts that need to be put together, but these don't need sashing. Some afternoon I'll get to them, I swear...!

The Downtown Dots, Sophie Makes Tracks, and two large patchwork square quilts (one with my collection of linen/cotton blends!). Gotta get those doneskies.

But, circling back to my US holiday...I'm going for my mom's birthday. I love my mom, and even though we didn't always see eye-to-eye as I was growing up, I appreciate that she was stressed, stretched, and struggling. I was a difficult teen at the same time her father was diagnosed with cancer, her house was being remodeled, and my family was adopting a child! As a mother now, I appreciate all the care and love that went into raising me, and I wanted to do something extra-nice for her. We're not really sentimental people so I decided to stick to what I'm good at and make her something she can use but that is beautiful. She loves roses and the color pink, but the test blocks I'd done before didn't seem to work. I stuck with my original rose print fabric and had a long think.

Then, a pattern from Scrap-Basket Sensations leapt out at me. I knew just what to do, and it required Kona solids. I had some brown on hand and dashed off to buy the rest of the colors I needed.

In addition to the deep brown I had and the rose print I'm basing the quilt around, I picked up Kona solids in Celery, Deep Rose, Melon, Pink, and Ice Peach.

Then I began cutting. It only took one evening to get them all cut out.

(Don't you love the urgent kikki.K sticky notes? No procrastinating for me!)

Then, while watching the first episodes of the Dr Who reboot from 2005 (I'd never seen it before), I sewed. I sewed and sewed and sewed.

Split units, and more split units.

Which were trimmed, pressed, and sewn together into roses....

(Never mind the baby toy. Piper was helping me sew.)

The roses then became blocks. I always make one, square it up, and hang it on the wall as a reference. As soon as I made this one, I LOVED it. I'm going to be pressed for time, but I'm so glad I waited to get this quilt RIGHT.

So, WiP Wednesday is a BIG one, because after HOUSE MADNESS, I began sewing with a vengeance. Time to get back to it, though...after a long bath with some calming, fragrant bath oil! I might take my frantic little one with me. She is super hyped up after a fun day with her cousins today. Claudia and Stephanie are going to England for a gap year between high school and uni and they stopped in to meet Piper today. I'll close with a photo of the twins, all grown up, ready for adventures! Good luck, girls! They have grown into such beautiful, articulate, intelligent young women and I am excited to see how their adventures progress!

Cheers for the new year and new adventures!

Until next time... xx

2012

Would you believe I'm not the type to do resolutions? I know, I know. I'm so Type A it's gross. I plan everything. But resolutions don't make sense to me. I suppose because I am constantly setting (and achieving!) goals it seems like a waste to dump them all on one day. Aren't we really making those resolutions for days, months, or years before we declare them? I tried to come up with a list, and this is what it looks like:

• Take a quilting class. Just one. It is tough while breastfeeding but make it work.
• Read more books. Remember books? You like those. Read more and write more.
• Be a good leader.

Yeah. That's it. Blah. Nothing inspiring or concrete! Where's the "lose ten kilos" goal, or the "floss every day" goal? Nowhere to be seen. Because goals like that I feel free to make any time of year. If I feel chubby or unfit, I pick myself up and go to the gym. If I feel small and unkind, I do something nice for someone. I try and achieve a sense of balance in everyday life.

I suppose I sound really smug, but honestly, I was tired of feeling bad for not "achieving" goals I felt pressured to make. So this year I'm keeping it simple, and doing things I want to do anyway. As an autodidact, I live in a constant state of self-led education. This is something I wake up and decide to do every day: today I will learn something new.

Since my list of resolutions is so hazily dismal, I thought instead I would talk about what I am grateful for. When it comes down to it, 2011 was my year. Everything went well for us. We are exceptionally blessed. So I am thankful for:

• For my husband, who is kind, generous, sympathetic and intelligent
• For my daughter, who is a joy to watch unfold into the world around her
• For my Parents-in-law who have been amazingly generous and helped us to buy a house
• For our HOUSE! It is not technically ours-ours yet, but we signed and exchanged contracts!
• For my best friend, for listening and sending the right email or text at always just the right moment
• For my writing group, whose support and humor this year have made it clear I'm where I'm meant to be, doing what I'm meant to do
• For my new sewing friends, who are sharing another passion with me
• For my "mothers' group" (AKA my friend Ellen) and her baby Olive, just for being there and part of my life
• For being fortunate enough to have rent, food, and bills covered
• For the drive to work, to improve, to self-educate, and the ability to smile when things got difficult

So, 2012: BRING IT. Let's make this year even awesomer than last year!

merry happy!

It's Christmas day, and we spent the afternoon with the Parents opening gifts and eating a delicious lunch. It was a nice sunny day, and after months of unseasonably cool weather it was nice to sit in the warmth and enjoy time with relatives. Piper made out like a bandit with clothes, books, and a few toys!

I, personally, have fallen in love with my ice-cream maker. Thank you, husband!

Although most of my time is taken up with the house these days (my brain looks like this: househousehousehousehousebabyhouse), I have managed to get a bit of sewing done. Thank heavens! I was going out of my MIND.

I have been trying to finish the quilt for my new niece, Maggie. I pieced a back I liked one insomniatic evening and pin-basted the next morning. That afternoon, I stared down my sewing machine and resolved to use my BSR function on my lovely new Bernina.

I did a practice run to try my stipple and decided just to jump straight into it. And...I liked it!

I've never met Maggie, and she's just a month old, but she was born with a clubbed right foot. I'd been thinking about the design of this quilt, and how hard she is going to have to work to walk. She is facing surgery and years of corrective footwear, but if you look at it like that, it's overwhelming. I thought to myself, take it one step at a time.

So, taking from the tiled patterns, I decided to call this quilt Stepping Stones. She has a long way to go but I can't wait to be there for her.

I bound it in blue and I'm hand-sewing the binding now. It is such a pleasure to work on this quilt. \

Anyway, I loved stippling so much that I went crazy and finished my Albatross Quilt, a.k.a. "Happy Campers". I can honestly say this quilt looks MUCH better than I thought it would! The blocks themselves were like "ergh" to me but now, trimmed and sewn together, dayamn. It looks FIIIINE.

Oh I feel so happy to see it DONE! I'm going to try Rita's machine binding technique for this quilt, once I decide what fabric to use for the binding. Then it will go up on my Etsy store and hopefully into the cot of a sweet little new baby.

My friend Claire and I went halfsies on some Nicey Jane fabric and she was gracious enough to cut it for me! I picked up some Kona cotton in Robin Egg blue to match. Ideas are percolating...

All that green and blue!

I also went a little nuts with precuts recently...and now they are staring me in the face.

What to make, what to make...hmm...!

And, finally, I should have blogged about this ages ago, but on the same day we found the house, we won a car seat for Piper (in a free raffle!), ate an amazing breakfast, and bought a new sewing chair. Oh. Oh my. It's so nice. It scootches across the floor, it goes up and down, it's WHITE...it's very cool. I feel like a proper sewist now. I have a little sewing area.

Life is good.

Merry Christmas!

wow.

So: we exchanged contracts tonight. No shenanigans, just the civil swapping of a few bits of paper, including a bank cheque and lots of things with signatures.

But in 42 days (or less!), this is ours.

Is that a jacaranda tree in the front yard? Why yes it is! There is a venerable old one in the backyard, too, under a horrid thicket of some sort of scrubby ivy-eaten bush I plan to get rid of. Look at that sweet little walkway. And those gorgeous agapanthus. Was this place made for me, or what?

But it needs work. Lucky for us, under that carpet and lino there is a beautiful cypress floor. All we need to do is polish it up and we have a glorious floor.

This is looking into the kitchen and beyond, the dining room. Mr Poppleton and Piper are checking things out.

The fireplace worked but was bricked up because the previous owner got scared when a critter scampered down into her living room!

The kitchen is quite poky. And those green walls? Evil, evil asbestos. It's all coming off, which is a shame, because I thought I might reuse those cabinets. But the evil evil asbestos means we're chucking the whole room out. But! I get a new one. Hello, Ikea!

Kettle not included.

This is the view out the back garden from the "dining room" (actually my sewing room and Mr Poppleton's study). Look! I have a Hills Hoist! And my backyard neighbor has chickens and there is a perfect purple splash of jacaranda just there. The huge sweetgum is a bonus too -- I can't wait to see it in autumn.

So this is it. I have so much work to do, which might mean this blog becomes a renovation blog while I sort out tradesmen and kitchens and bathrooms and laundry rooms and floors and painting and everything else including the kitchen sink! Hopefully I'll still get time to sew. I did make something this week, at long last - a handbag!

I got the pattern from Joel Dewberry - the Inflight Hobo bag. I added ruffles instead of piping and it looks so sweet in the Lark fabrics from Amy Butler. I'm quite pleased with it!

Off to snuggle with my family, and dream of bathroom tiles...yikes haha!

This is a story.

When a cute little American girl and a shy little Australian boy fall in love, she moves, they get engaged, they get married, they make a baby, and they realize they're still renting, the urge comes upon them to begin building equity. They set a budget, get loan preapproval, and begin looking for houses.

When the aforementioned couple finds a house that is pretty much perfect in every respect (dry, wood floors, sound, cute as a button, good location, big backyard) and it needs minimal renovation (bathroom, kitchen, laundry room, floors and painting) and even less yardwork (one oleander bush), then the aforementioned couple would be wise to make an offer.

When the inspection turns up a couple of fibro walls, however, this is where it turns tricky.

Fibro is a generic term for a group of products manufactured from the 1950s which sometimes contained asbestos. It was touted as a miracle substance because it's fire-resistant and highly insulating. It's lightweight and easy to install and, oh yeah, one tiny fibre in your lungs can cause asbestosis and ultimately, mesothelioma. It's evil. It's pretty much the definition of why untested technology is terrifying. It was only banned completely in 2003, even though they'd known since the 1980s how terrible it is. So "safe" homes are houses built before 1945 (which have another set of problems) and after 1985 (which are generally ugly).

Now, one can live in a house with fibro panelling quite safely. If it's not cracked or damaged, it's fine. When it is cracked and deteriorating in, say, the laundry room, then you have to see about getting it removed by qualified technicians who dress up like moon men because this stuff is just that awful.

So although it is well within the couple's price range, the property of interest is actually be dangerous to live in. Immediate steps would have to be carried out in order for this family to move in. On top of the already firm plans to pull up the grody carpet to polish up the beautiful cypress floorboards and to paint all the walls, there is now a plan to pull out the kitchen and bathroom and laundry and just start all over. Put up drywall where there was asbestos, take out the bathroom tiles and replace all the fittings with new, and completely redo the laundry.

This would be the case for pretty much any house in their price range in that area. Fibro is everywhere.

It's not unexpected so it's certainly not the part that stresses us out. The stressful part is where we the agent tried to corral us into signing a contract we hadn't seen along with a waiver of our right of a cooling off period. My husband is a patient man and it is something to see him get angry. You know those pictures of storm clouds coming across plains, like in southern Wyoming? It was like that. As soon as he realized what they wanted us to do - sign a contract we and our solicitor hadn't seen, and waive rights to a cooling off period - hoo boy, watch yo'self!

So we're back to looking at other places, just to keep our options open. We've signed nothing and paid nothing. We're just interested. But it's hard. We just want to make a home.

And that's the long version of why I haven't sewn, written, or done anything else for a fortnight. Yikes. Tonight's the night: I'm going to sit down with my machine and churn out a dang quilt top. Everything else is out of my hands and that is fine. I just want to make something beautiful.

MIA

I have been missing in action for a week and a bit, but I promise it is for a very good reason.

I'd like to not say anything about it just yet, but I promise that soon we'll be back to our regularly scheduled blogging!

Thanks for sticking with me. I promise I haven't abandoned you! :)

WIP Wednesday

I know I say this every week, but WHAT A WEEK. I'm so glad to get to WIP Wednesday because it gives me a minute to stop, think, assess, and BREATHE. And this week has been a week where I need to breathe.

I'm also tragically late linking up. Yikes. But more about the Britta Week* after the good stuff. PICTURES!!

I began a new project this week. My sister recently gave birth to a little girl and named her Maggie, so this is a quilt for Maggie. It's a really simple but lovely block found at Film in the Fridge, and made using some Prima White Homespun from Spotlight and leftover Sophie!

The blocks all look different and will look great scattered and mixed up.

This week I've also done a few more blocks for my in progress Garden Fence blocks and Sophie Makes Tracks blocks. My Garden Fences are all squared, but I've only done 19/49. GAH. So many more to do!

\

But my Sophie Makes Tracks blocks are ALL finished and so beautiful. Here are a few laid out!

I'm not laying them all out YET - tomorrow afternoon is my Sophie Makes Tracks day - but they look SO AMAZING. I'm glad I'm taking my time.

This little one is napping in her cot and I just LOVE it.

And finally, a sneak peek at a dressmaking project I'm undertaking - we'll see how we go! I picked these voiles up at Cottage Quiltworks this afternoon and, hey -- their class lists for 2012 are up! I've got my red pen out already. What to choose, what to choose!

Such silky voiles. I can't stop looking at them. Just beautiful.

So: the week of DOOM. First it was injections for the baby. (Immunizing is good!) Mr Poppleton came along as moral support and lucky thing he was there, as I'd left her blue book at home. (This is something all Australian kids get - it's their entire medical history from birth onward, including their immunization histories.) So my dear husband ran home to get it and got to the doctor just in time to see the nurse give the jabs. One stick, two stick, pouting, screaming!

I hate immunizations. She trusts me. And I let them STICK her.

After that I left my wallet in the cafe (guh) then that night, sewing, I managed to leave a friend's house and get locked in a mysterious garden you can't escape from in her apartment complex.

On top of that, Piper has been biting during feeds, my arm has begun to feel weak and tired (a common problem when you carry a 7.3kg baby around six hours a day), and I'm underslept. Mr Poppleton is having a bad week too. We are really looking forward to the weekend. It will be nice to relax a little. Life is so go-go-go right now.

How was your week? And how are your WIPs? Let me know!

Here's to a great weekend!

*Britta in Community is generally regarded as "the worst" and her name is used as a verb to mean "make a very small mistake". :)

Oh My Stars Quilt Along

Well well! Look who has finally decided to join a quilt-along?

(Ahem. Me. It's me.)

I'm going to go with this one, if only because it's pretty and it looks really scrappy! And I caught it before it actually begins, which never happens, and because stars are something I see all the time but haven't done yet. So here I am, growing as a quilter, yay!

And now I'm off to join the Flickr group for the QAL as well. Anyone else joining this one? Should be fun!

Monsoon / Fabric Friday

This week is FULL of rain. I feel like I'm a scruffy kid again. I grew up in a house that sat on drained marshland in Southern Oregon, my feet were permanently wet, and more than once I lost my shoes to the sucking mud at the edges of the fields near our house. I haven't had wet feet for years, but this week...ugh.

I love the rain, but after four days of it, I would very much like it to STOP.

On a quick side note, last night I finished ALL OF THE BEAR CLAWS. Oh yes. You heard me right. ALL OF THEM.

I sat down at my machine last night and gritted my teeth. I would get those HST squares sewn together! Then, I finished the first step. So I pressed them, stacked them, and pinned the relief squares. This is the serpentine stack of ready-to-be-sewns.

After that, well, I couldn't stop, could I?! I finished at 1:36am and there they were, 81 perfectly pressed bear claws. Tomorrow at Modern Quilt Guild I'll take them along to square them up. But oh. Oh how I love them. I know it is true love, otherwise how else could I have sewn together 810 pieces of fabric without chucking the whole lot out the window? Haha.

My next order of business, though, is my Garden Fence quilt. I've done 15 blocks (of 49) and here are the rest. Check out these "fenceposts"!

I'm not looking forward to tackling that pile. But today I will grit my teeth and get 'er done! I'm excited to have these done to square up tomorrow as well.

Now, on to Fabric Friday.

I surprised myself this week by working mostly within my stash, and sewing down some projects. But I did get a few bits and pieces. This is my Kona solids collection. I snaffled up some orange and some blue this week, in addition to the Slate, Cerise, Peridot, and of course Snow that I already have. Somewhere in my stash I have some Turquoise and some Sky Blue, too.

I added to my Reece Scannell solids, too. I love how rich these colors are, and I admit, I'm collecting these while waiting for inspiration to strike.

And I found some pretty fabric for bindings (the stripe), added to my Lecien (the tan circle), found some green and blue motif I like, and picked up a purple as well!

The best part of my fabric week, however, was when my 3 yards of Kona Snow came in the mail along with my Kona Color Card! Yeah!!

Kona Snow is pretty boring to photograph, but if you look closely, it's the square of off-white just beneath the true white. Ahh. So perfect. (I'm such a huge nerd.)

Finally, yesterday I left the munchkin with her Nanna and Granddad and went off to learn more about my sewing machine. Christine at Hobbysew in Top Ryde walked me through several of the functions of my new Bernina, and I even did some stippling! It was only an hour lesson but I came home so inspired. Piper had fun too, with Nanna and Granddad. She always does!

It has been a sad week for Nanna and Granddad, as we farewelled the family dog. Spatz had gotten a tick and as a result gotten very sick. The Parents went to say goodbye and let us know late that night that he was gone.

Goodbye, little mate. You were a stubborn little dude and I can't believe you're gone. The backyard at the big house certainly won't be the same without you. And who's going to keep those pesky birds in line? Gah, I'm tearing up just thinking about it.

So a mixed week. But there is one thing that makes it all worthwhile. A sleepy saturday morning baby, all snuggled up in Daddy's arms.

Yep. This is the life.