Happy New Year and Welcome to 2012

I can't believe it has been so long since I posted! I have been so busy with life that I simply have not had time to do my normal usual stuff. I managed to finish my brother's wedding quilt with only a few hours to spare and in my haste forgot to take photos. Other than that, there has been no quilting at ALL!

To start things off, we went on a holiday the first week of December to Caloundra  Queensland and had a fantastic time.

Getting my toes into the sand

The family enjoying the water and sand

The start of a very big castle.

Fun with the water sprouts

Our Hoggs Breath Café dessert

 I managed to do some crocheting while we were away, but that will get put away to finish off on the next holiday - I always find I really need to do something.

We then came home from holidays and relaxed and ready to finish off the last week of school. We said our goodbyes to those leaving the school this year and see you later to the ones coming back next year. 

We trimmed our tree very late this year, but it got done and that is the main thing. I love this picture of DD on daddy's shoulder to put on the star!

My handsome baby brother got married to a gorgeous girl and they will live happily ever after. It was a very beautiful ceremony - very private and intimate. It was a perfect day.

And more big news! We got a new puppy! After 5 years of putting it off we had to give in. After looking at many breeds of dog we (as in I) chose a spoodle. We picked a spoodle for a few reasons: they don't shed (almost at all), they are small, very loyal and love children. So it was perfect for us.

 Hubby and I promised DS when he turned 10 he could get one. Well, he turned 10 this year (how did that happen so fast!) so we just had to get a dog and he arrived from Melbourne a few days before Christmas. The excitement the kids felt on the way to the airport to pick him up was simply amazing. They just couldn’t wait. So here he is - our beautiful black spoodle called Monty.

We celebrated Christmas first thing Sunday morning and it was so much fun even for me! We unwrapped many, many presents but we had already received the most exciting one so it was like having two Christmas'.

Basically since Christmas we have been busy with puppy and have done nothing exciting. Even New Years Eve was spent at home watching the fireworks on TV. We are just enjoying our time at home while hubby is on holidays too and relaxing and getting to know our new puppy.

Sydney Modern Quilt Guild November Meeting

Another SYDMQG meeting and it went great. I just love getting together with other talented women to sit and discuss craft and just life in general.


There was a great turnout once again and where were some faces from our first meeting and a few new ones too.


Show and tell is always great - I love seeing what everyone is doing and then wondering if I can fit something like that into my already full schedule. I just love seeing all the different ways that everyone quilts and the ideas they put out of their creative heads into fabric and then a quilt.


During show and tell Lorena gave us a quick explanation on how to use folded mirror to help fussy cut fabric. Yet another gadget on my 'gotta get' list. Hubby will love that one.


It was a very busy day at the Pub - it was very full and the pub was abuzz with so much noise. We were very lucky at times to hear each other but we managed.


I managed to snap a few pictures and here they are:

If you are interested in coming along or finding out more about the Sydney Modern Quilt Guild just pop over here.

I love E-Readers

In a previous post  I talked about my beloved ECO Reader. I bought this wonderful E-Reader in 2009 before the Kindle was available to us Aussies.


I love my ECO and I have read many, many books on it. But lately it has started to play up. It takes much longer than it should to recharge, it is taking twice as long to turn pages and I seem to have to reset it at least once a week. The other day it just died on me. I was in tears for many reasons, the main one was I didn’t really want to go and buy another E-Reader I wanted this one to work again. After plugging it into the charger for a day and then resetting it and pushing all the buttons in different combinations it finally came back to life but it was still slow and sluggish. I whinged about it to hubby and he told me to buy a new one. His reasoning was that we would be going on holidays soon and if it died on holidays he wouldn’t hear the end of it.


Okay, good point.


The ECO Reader is (as far as I can tell) no longer available so that was out not to mention it was really expensive to start with, so I thought I may as well go with the most popular E Reader which is the Kindle. I was pleasantly surprised that it was available at my local Dick Smith store for $135. Sold! I paid triple that for my original ECO.


So I bought the Kindle home and it was ready to use out of the box - brilliant. I hooked it up to my mac and then tried downloading some of my books. I hit a snag here, the Kindle only reads mobi files. This is a bit of a problem as my ECO reads almost every ebook format out there and all my books are in all different formats mainly epub. Luckily for me I have Calibre the best ebook management system EVER and it's free, it is so good that it allows me to convert all of my ebooks from whatever format they are in to any other format so I had to convert all of mine to mobi. I have a lot of books so it took a while but I did my favourites first and then moved them across to the Kindle.


Reading on the Kindle is fantastic. It is so light, I would say almost half the weight of the ECO. The page turning is almost instantaneous, I am used to hitting the next page button when I have a line or two left to read as it used to take that long to change but with the kindle I have to read the last word on the page before I hit the next page button and before I have even lifted my finger off the button the next page is up - more than awesome. I also think that the way the text is displayed it is easier to read. I can't put my finger on specifics but it just reads easier.


I have one big gripe with the Kindle (for now) and that is how it stores and organises ebooks in the memory. My ECO had an external SD card which I had all of my ebooks stored on, in a structured format by author A-K, L-Z and then subdivided into individual letters for the authors. It made looking for the books I wanted to read that much easier for me and I used a lot less page clicks. The kindle stores everything on the home page and if I have 200 books, that is a lot of books to go through to find the one I want. The books can be sorted into Collections which I have not yet explored fully and hopefully that will be what I am looking for to help sort my books, but there is also the ability to do a search as there is a keyboard function on the Kindle that my ECO did not have. I guess in the long run I just need to work out the best way to use the Kindle for my purposes, reading the manual usually helps so I might have to give that a go!


I have had some people as me why I just don't use an iPad and the answer to that is very simple. E Readers are smaller and lighter and fit in my medium sized handbag. E Readers have a battery life of about a month as they use e-ink technology, an iPad would need to be charged very day or every other day, decides my kids love to use the iPad to play their apps and then when they go to bed my Hubby snags it. I like that the screen looks like page from a book and if and when this new Kindle E readers dies I will get another one to replace it. 

ECO Reader

Kindle 3G

The screen sizes are the exact same but the Kindle is smaller due to the outside casing being smaller and it is so much lighter.

A Neglectful Farmer's Wife

I feel like it has been forever since I have sewn a Farmer's Wife block, so last night I decided to stop being so neglectful and be a dedicated Farmer's Wife again and sew a few blocks together.

FWS#61 Northern Lights

FWS#62 Old Windmill

FWS#67 Pine Tree

FWS#68 Postage Stamp

I have skipped a few in-between these ones due to the fact they will probably need to be paper pieced. I have drawn out a few on graph paper to see if I can somehow rotary cut them but I find doing any blocks that have unusual angles like FWS#60 Noon and Night or rectangles or square pieces set on point FWS#58 Mothers Dream very hard to draw out and work out the measurements for. I will need to do a hunt around in blogland and see if anyone has tutorials on how to do this.


I have also managed to find from my local $2 store an A4 pad of Newsprint paper which I am hoping will be great for paper piecing patterns. I will give it a go with my next paper pieced block.

Central Park Quilt Coming Right Along

My little baby brother (who is 36 mind you) is getting married in December to a really lovely lady and I am thrilled to be making him and his fiancé a quilt as part of the wedding gift from me and my family.


My future SIL picked both the pattern and the fabric (sounds so simple doesn’t it, but it wasn’t) and I have been busily trying to get it finished along with the other 12 projects that all need to be finished by Christmas for my kids teachers and both sets of parents. 


I was thrilled when I managed to get the bulk of the quilt top finished. I have been working on it a bit at a time. Firstly I didn’t have enough fabric and finding charm packs of Central Park was a little difficult. Then I had to wait for my bolt of Vanilla Emma Louise Quilters Muslin to arrive, but finally all the elements came together and now it only needs a white border all the way round and then the top is done.

Now I need to decide on the quilting pattern. I will be doing an allover panto but I am not sure if I want to do feathers, or some sort of geometrical pattern or even swirls! Don't you just hate it when you have too many choices? I am leaning more towards a swirly pattern to soften up the squares a bit. I have a little more time to decide, so I will have to sleep on it.

Back to Basics

I thought I might give you an update on my Perfect 1/4" foot System. In a previous post I talked about my new foot and the Clearly Perfect Angles template.

I am still using the Little Foot 1/4" foot and I love it. I have been using the Clearly Perfect Angles for over two months now. I really love the template and it works so well if you ONLY sew using the 1/4" foot for quilting and you don't really need to change the needle plate or use the sewing guide.

I found that I had to change the needle plate from the regular plate to the straight stitch one every now and again and it was a bit of a pain. Also I was finding that my pins were getting caught under the template as I usually sew over my pins and I don't usually remove them when I get to the needle. Other than these few small issues for me personally I really love how well it worked.

But...

these few problems were becoming a little bit of a problem for me so I have gone back to what I call basics - using masking tape for my guide. I have the yellow masking tape to mark the centre which is great for sewing squares and rectangles diagonally from one corner to another and the green one is my 1/4" guide. I have then marked a dark navy line along the 1/4" mark to make it easier to see. I have been using this method for the last week and so far so good. I have managed to use my sewing guide without an issue, no more pins getting caught under the template and I can change my needle plate with no problems.

I have put my Clearly Perfect Angles back in the protective cover that I got it in and I am saving it for another time when I am sure I will desperately want to use it again. But for now I have gone back to basics and it is working just fine.

Purple Peasant Dress Finished.

I started making a Peasant dress last week and only that the neckline to go. I have been so busy with other things that I didn’t get around to doing it until last night.

Here is the before picture. The darker purple is from a top and the mauve is from DD's Dora PJ bottoms. I thought they looked nice together.

I realised that I don't have to finish off a knit fabric raw edge as it does not fray, so I just folded over the neckline and stitched it down, pulled the elastic through the casing, closed it off and it’s done.

I think it turned out very nicely. My only issue is that I don't have the AG doll with me in the studio when I sew, so I can't always check to see how the clothes fit straight away, and these clothes are a surprise for my DD.


I tried buying a AG dress form but the shipping for one of those to Australia costs more than the doll form itself. If anyone has any advise on how to make an AG doll dress form I would love to hear it - please.


I was cleaning out the Attic yesterday and came across a srtay bag of DD's small clothes - there are lots of wonderful fabrics in this batch and I am very excited about it. I think making doll's clothes is my new obsession  passion. 


I am sure once Christmas is over I will be right back with my Farmer's Wife blocks. In fact I actually miss making them. I have cut out pieces for the next four that I want to make I just haven't gotten around to sewing them.