A friendly kind of bomb

Yarn bombing of course or yarn storming as it is also known. I took a little drive down Hampton Street today in search of the wonderful yarn bombing that was there just a few weeks ago. Alas there wasn’t much left but there were a couple of colourfully dressed trees left. I did notice a few other ways the streetscape has had a bit of artistic cheering up!

Yarn -bombed tree in Hampton Street

Yarn bombed tree – Hampton Street

I really appreciate this kind of ‘graffiti’ as I think it brings a touch of colour, whimsy and humour to an otherwise dull street-scape. I’m always a bit taken aback when I read negative comments in the local newspaper complaining that it is untidy, messy and unhygenic! Oh please, surely anything harmless that brings a bit of a smile to people’s faces can’t be that bad can it?

For those of you who appreciate a little yarn bombing, take a look at Stitched up Mama for a taste of subversive knitting and crochet!
and here at Yarn Corner which is a Melbourne based group.

I thought you might also appreciate this shop I noticed – haven’t seen anything like this before:

Shop decorated with lace doilies

Close up of
doilees

And a little bit of mosaic never goes amiss:

I would love to hear your thoughts on street art ie. what is acceptable and where (if anywhere) should we draw the line.

I have the lovely Winter Owls to thank for nominating me for the Versatile Blogger Award and very honoured I am to accept it (even though its taken me a while to get round to it)! I love her blog and her original style – go have a look, if you haven’t already, there are great craft ideas, lovely photos, artwork and Ruby the pugalier!

Now for my 15 nominations for the Award – I understand if you feel unable to accept the award if you are too busy or for whatever reason. Please just take it as acknowledgement that your blog has given me much pleasure over the last few months!:

The Nerdy Sewist
Living Simply Free
Life on a Dirt Road
Beyond Back Creek
The Inbox Jaunt
Crazy Wonderful Life
Pauline Knits
A Daisy Garden
Creative Pixie
Cute as a Button 82
Gone Rustic
Blogging in the Slow Lane
Daniella Joes Blog
The Green Dragonfly
Stitched Up Mama

Now for 7 facts you may not know about me:

1. At age 12 I was a huge Donny Osmond fan
2. I’m not keen on olives or anchovies (but love olive oil)
3. I always loved SF particularly Doctor Who and Star Trek (what a geek)
4. I love HBO program’s like Sopranos, Mad Men and Breaking Bad
5. I always eat the orange creams first, never the caramels (they pull my fillings out).
6. The first single I ever bought was A Walking Miracle (bet no one remembers that!)
7. I dream of renting a cottage in Tuscany or South of France for a couple of months and walking to the local market every day for bread and cheese.

Well this has been a bit of an epic post, hope I didn’t lose everyone on the way!

I will also take the opportunity to wish all of you a happy New Year and an extra yummy, creative 2013!

Peace, Joy, Lego houses and quilting in the holiday season!

I hope you are all well and have enjoyed a wonderful Christmas with your loved ones.

Our Melbourne Christmas was a fairly relaxed and quiet affair but enjoyable all the same.

We have a street BBQ every Christmas morning and this year it was our turn to host it so there we were at 8.30am cooking up sausages outside our house waiting for neighbours to arrive. Its always a great way to catch up with neighbours you generally only wave at throughout the year and a nice way to welcome and get to know new residents.

We even have a trophy lego house that gets awarded each year to the house with the most noticeable improvements! You then get the honour of keeping the ‘trophy’ (its supposed to take pride of place on the mantle piece) all year and awarding it to whoever you feel most deserving the next Christmas!! Just a bit of fun really but it always creates a lot of laughter.

The rest of the day was spent with friends – eating (way too much), laughing and generally relaxing.

When we got home in the evening (ready to drop) it was time to phone family on the other side of the world and it always feels strange that just as we are coming to the end of our Christmas celebrations, they are just starting theirs. When I first came to Australia this was particularly difficult for me but I have to say that as we have gradually developed our own ‘traditions’ over the years and our children are now teens, it no longer upsets me – so thats a good thing!

What else have I been doing over the last week …. well I managed to finish the small lap quilt I showed off last time – the one I made with the tumbler blocks, cut from the Go Baby, fabric cutter.

I had a go at quilting this one myself as it was quite small and decided just to do wavy lines vertically and horizontally with a variagated pink thread.

I carried on the wavy line quilting in the borders and for the first time had a go at completely machine binding a quilt – sewing onto the reverse of the quilt and then folding it over to the front and machine blanket stitching on the front. One major thing I learned was, always cut your binding strips at least 2″ wide and not 1 3/4″ like I did (it was a struggle to say the least)!

As I mentioned in my last post I didn’t really have a purpose for this quilt when I started it but then of course the tragic events in Connecticut and the comment left on my Mad Cows Day Out post on December 12th by sowninpeace meant this quilt did have a purpose after all. I hope it gets to its destination safely and helps in some small way.

Wishing you all love and happiness for the holiday season.

Having fun with my Baby!

Baby Go!

Don’t you just love getting a new toy to play with? I do and its not even Christmas yet! Anyway here it is – the Go Baby fabric cutter by Accuquilt.

There is a bigger version too but this one is just fine for my needs. I wanted to test out how quickly I could put a small quilt top together so this is what happened:

Cutting out the pieces

I have used a small tumbler die for this quilt (3.5″) and being me, I started cutting at 10pm and cut out 154 tumbler shapes – this took me exactly 1 hour.

Then I laid them all out on the floor to get the colour combination right and stacked them all in their rows – ready for sewing.

After sewing all the tumblers together into their rows – I ironed the seams (alternating them to the left on one row and then to the right on the next etc.)

Then I sewed the rows together (this is where those little labels come in handy).

A bit more ironing and then I put a 3.5″ border on and ……..

One finished quilt top!

This really was a whizz to put together – even though I was doing an hour here and there – It still only took me a couple of days so really good if you had a cot quilt or lap quilt you wanted to put together quickly for a present.

I didn’t have any real plans for this quilt and then its purpose became clear but I’ll tell you about that later.

Mad COWS day out!

There’s nothing like a fun day out with the girls and that’s exactly what we did last Saturday even though it was a bit on the hot side (about 38C which is probably well up in the 90’s in Fahrenheit). There were 10 of us in two cars and we were making our way up to Ballarat which is about 2 hours north from our part of Melbourne. Our first stop was in Ballan which is a great spot and really worth a visit if you get the chance. Mill Rose Quilting and Gallery was just beautifully laid out and we really enjoyed looking at all their gorgeous fabric and patterns.

I hear rumour that they are starting a bed and breakfast so will definitely be keeping that one in mind for a weekend retreat!

We also dropped into the farmers market in Ballan and enjoyed looking at all the lovely produce and couldn’t resist buying some of their crusty bread, of which we were given many tastings. We were a bit tempted by the cheese too but I think we quickly realised it would be a big and smelly mistake on such a hot day!

After Ballan, we took off up to Ballarat and visited Eureka Patchwork and Ballarat Patchwork and stopped at a wonderful place for lunch (we were ready to chew an arm off by this stage)! Its called Wen and Ware and is a fabulous gift shop and delicious lunch stop. Even managed to do a bit of Christmas shopping – for me!! All in all a very successful day and quite ready to collapse in a heap when I got home. Luckily himself had got the new pizza oven fired up and we had our very first wood-fired pizzas – YUM!

Baby flannel quilt

Still waiting for news of baby’s arrival (from friends in Bonnie Scotland) but in the meantime I set to putting some flannel squares together to make a nice snuggly quilt for bub. I appliqued some stars on to the squares and then gave to Natalie at the Quilting Bug who echoed the star design in her quilting. Hopefully mum, dad and baby will enjoy!

Baby flannel quilt with stars

Thought you might like to see a couple of other that came back at the same time. The first one is my friend Carol’s who made a large version of this (not shown) and a small baby one which she is about to send off as a present overseas. I think you will agree it is very pretty (and bonus knowing that it is made up from the left-overs of a bigger quilt – including the batting)!

Carrie’s been at it again too! Again this one is going overseas with get well wishes for her mother in law. I think this quilt would cheer up anyone’s Christmas.

Here are some proteas I often pass in a friend’s front garden – I just couldn’t resist their beautiful colours and I hope it brings a touch of sunshine to those going into the depths of winter!!

Pioneer Craft Market

It was over a week ago now but I wanted to share a couple of photos with you from the Pioneer Craft Market held at the local church in Cheltenham. Our little group gets together every Friday morning and a lot of knitting, crochet and hand sewing gets done while we chat and have a cuppa together. Twice a year we hold a market and sell some of the things we have made over the year and the money raised goes to a variety of causes such as: Flying Doctors, The Fred Hollows Foundation, SIDS and Kids and the Leprosy Foundation. This time round we managed to raise about $1500 which gave us all a bit of a warm glow!!

Even the sun shined for us!

My friend Carrie and I shared a stall with me selling my craft supplies and she selling some of the lovely Suubi village jewellery and bags for HUG (Help Us Grow) I can proudly tell you that the HUG stall (added to sales made after the OLA Church mass on Sunday) made over $600! which is pretty substantial considering every cent raised goes directly to the maker of the item – every item is labelled and all sales written down so we know who it goes to.

All in all a very satisfying day!!