Quilt Fabric Choosing...

I'm planning on making a couple of baby quilts, so today I spent some enjoyable hours looking a fabric online to get for them. I found that Fabric Shack has a great selection, and more than enough for me to choose from, so this lot will all come from them.

Depressingly it's FAR cheaper to get fabric online than in the shops here, and even though I'd like to support the Australian fabric stores, I'm a poor student so I can't all the time.

Moving on, the quilts I have planned:

Firstly a quilt for a baby boy.

I'm a huge fan of Red Pepper Quilts, all the quilts that she makes are absolutely stunning, in particular this Zig Zag Quilt is amazing and the main inspiration for the quilt I have planned. I intend to make half square triangle zig-zags like hers, but I think I'm going to make it without the white in between to see how that looks. The fabrics I've chosen are the following:

With one of these two for the binding:

And this one on the back:

And secondly, a baby girl quilt.

The inspiration for this quilt is this stunning quilt by Film in the Fridge (who also makes some gorgeous creations). I plan on using a similar colour scheme as hers, but haven't decided on the layout exactly yet - although it will probably heavily feature squares of some kind. The fabrics I've picked for this one are:

With one of these for the binding:

And this on the back:

(note: all of these fabrics are from fabric shack, the filenames of the images are the names to search for on their site)

What do you think? Do you think the quilts will turn out well? Do you think leaving out the white on the zig-zags will make it too busy? Which fabric would you use for each of the bindings?

Once I've decided for certain I need to work out how much of each to buy (and then double check my sums) and order it!

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star...

This evening I had another sewing date, this time with my friend Mindy, who I have assisted (mostly by the use of my sewing machine) to make her costume for the Christmas Party. On the weekend we went on a field trip to spotlight and bought this fantastic holographic silver fabric:

We drew around Mindy and fashioned a Star shape on of the fabric, which was cut out and sewn together. Not much more to do to finish it!!

I've been instructed not to post photos of the actual costume until after the party ;)

Erin's Lunch Bag

Otherwise known as "why I'm never working with PVC again".

The other week I wanted to make my friend Erin a lunch bag for her birthday . I wanted to make it out of oil-cloth (or similar) but couldn't find anything with a print that I liked, but in Lincraft I found this PVC printed with cupcakes. I bought some matching pink drill and some plain PVC.

Following a combination of two tutorials here and here and a few of my own measurements, I made them into a lunchbag, with the clear PVC on the inside and the printed PVC on the outside. As the holes would have stayed in the PVC I used masking tape instead of pins to hold the pieces in place. I also had to put tissue paper either side of the PVC to stop it sticking to the sewing machine.

I added a covered button closure and it all came together quite well.

Christmas Party Costumes...

I had another sewing date on the weekend and my rainbow of fabric started to be made into some costumes for the work Christmas party.

So far we have Sailors Collars:


And big fabric bows:



And, in my best Ralph Harris impersonation - "Have you guessed what it is yet?"

PS: Please don't tell people at work, as we're not telling everyone, and yes, that means you too Amelia ;)

Christmas edging closer and closer!

My advent calendar is hung and filled with yummy chocolatey goodies (bought from the Lindt shop that opened in the city a few months ago).

With the remaining fabric from my advent calendar I decided to make some Christmas decorations for our living room.

I used the extra squares, and made some more out of the extra strips, folded them in half diagonally and stitched some red ribbon down the fold to make them into bunting... until I ran out of ribbon when I just chain stitched the triangles together.

Very rough and very simple. If I had pinking shears I would have cut them with that to stop any fraying.

The living room is now looking very festive, and a little bit circus-like.

Oh, and how superbly fantastically tacky is my Christmas tree! I got it in Borders last week, I just couldn't resist!!

Softies for Mirabel

I finished off another little monster to go with the first one.

I toddled off down to Meet Me At Mikes (about 5 minutes walk from my house) on Saturday to deliver the softies to their fantastic cause. I was lucky enough to meet the lovely Pip while I was there and to get a sneak preview at the pile of donated softies (mostly still in their packaging).

I'm looking forward to going along to see all the softies in the window!

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!