Fortunate Washing Incident...

While pre-washing the reds from the rainbow of fabric I bought the other week I shoved in my calico "plastic bag" in with them as it was filthy, not quite thinking it through.

This is what it looked like before:

This is what it looks like now:

My little vege patch

A small change from sewing, but something I'm equally proud of and having plenty of fun doing; my vege patch.

This year I decided to try my hand at growing veges. I've never really done any gardening before so it's all a bit of an adventure, and I'll be the first to admit that I'm only interested in growing things that produce stuff for me to eat.

So without further ado, here's my vege patch:

I have three types of tomatoes, two types of strawberries, snow peas and spinich.

While I don't have any tomatoes on the normal tomato plants yet the cherry tomatoes are doing great:

The snowpeas are also doing well, I have quite a few snow peas of various sizes (although I need to look up when to know when to harvest and eat them):

And the spinich is doing great, I can just go and take leaves whenever I want some for a salad, or a sandwich, or cooking and it just keeps on happily growing.

Sadly the strawberries don't seem to be doing very well; I have a couple of little strawberries that are appearing, but the plants themselves are actually much smaller than they were and not looking happy at all. They're looking a bit better over the last few days but still not fantastic, any idea what I might be doing wrong?

I have also had a go at growing carrots from seeds. I have managed to get the seeds to germinate and start growing like little blades of grass, and some even start looking like little carrot seedlings, but then for some reason they just die and I have no idea why! Help?

In the spirit of saving water, which is a must here in Victoria, I spent some time on Sunday working out the cycles on the washing machine so that we can move the hose that drains the water into a large bucket to collect the grey water from the rinse cycles. Collecting the water from all but the first rinse cycle fills the bucket, and my washing powder is 'grey water safe' so it's all good to put on the garden. I also learnt that one cycle on our washing machine uses about 55-60L of water.

Finished and Gifted

My lack of posts have not been due to lack of sewing activity, but the opposite; I've been sewing heaps, and am also hopeless at taking photos of stuff and photoless posts are boring!

Last night I stayed up late to finish off the second advent calendar as today is my brother's birthday and that was his birthday gift. Here are the two finished advent calendars:

They are practically identical except the order of the pockets is mirrored vertically and horizontally and they have different coloured bindings. I wanted to get them both finished so that my bro could choose which one he wanted; he chose the red one.

Finishing the second one seemed to turn into so much trouble! I had bought a second spool of thread for the quilting but it's gone missing, so I quilted until I ran out on the weekend and then had to take an unplanned dash to Tessuti on Monday. I spent some of Monday evening and then Tuesday evening sweltering over my sewing machine (we're having a mini-heatwave here in Melbourne; not that hot really but we're not used to it this early in the summer!) only to look up one square from the end to see that I was almost out of thread again!! I carefully manoeuvred my quilting so that I finished around the edge first so that when I ran out I could still finish off the binding and do the last bit of quilting after getting more thread (poor practice I know, but desperate times!). Luckily I had just enough thread, and I mean just, here's how much I had left when I finished:

Fabric obsession...

I think I'm developing a problem... I've spent far too much money on fabric recently. Here is some of what I've purchased:

Fabric for two sidonie skirts; one for me (the top one) and one for kylie (the bottom one) that we're going to make tomorrow evening:


Fabric for two pairs of summer PJ bottoms:


A rainbow of fabrics for the fancy dress costumes for me and the girls for our work christmas party:


Now I'd better get back behind my sewing machine and use up everything that I've bought lately!