Oh,

And Chris just rang to say he loves his t-shirt! Happy Birthday Chris!

Sewing Class - continued

Well, look at these! Jasmine managed the first 7 lines of quilting on the machine (the horizontal lines, from the bottom of the sea upwards) - and then decided, like a lot of more experienced quilters, that her time would be more enjoyably spent in design and execution of the tops only and that she could contract out the quilting and binding to Auntie Janice. And as she told me, she is only five! So her quilt is now finished but she did spend quite some time deciding on the colour of the binding.

James did almost all of his quilting himself - all of the sea and most of the wiggly seaweed lines. He managed the sewing machine very well, learning to control the speed and to wiggle the fabric to make the straight stitch sew the curves of the seaweed. He chose the binding and I sewed that on with the machine. He is persevering in the hand sewing of the binding on the back of the quilt, so his is not quite finished yet. But he'll get there, I'm sure.

After a couple of hours in the sewing room yesterday afternoon they both decided that the day was beautiful and sunny and they hadn't explored the swing or the tree house or the fort since last time they were here and they had better go and check them out. I could hear where they were and continued on with the binding of their quilts. After a while I realised I hadn't heard much for about the last five minutes so went to investigate. They had been searching "the forest" (our patch of bush which stretches down a fairly steep slope on the side of our house paddock) for the fort and wandered too far down the slope and Jasmine couldn't find her way back up. I had to find a good way down and show her a good way back up, through the bracken and broken branches. A few months ago it would have been a lot harder for me to do than I found it to be yesterday. Yayy for weight loss!

Sewing Class

James and Jasmine have arrived a day earlier than the rest of their family to stay with us for a week or so. Jasmine loved the quilt I have hanging in the lounge and asked how to make a quilt like that. So we spent a couple of hours this afternoon, tracing pictures from a colouring book onto vliesofix, cutting out the parts of the picture, ironing the bits onto carefully chosen fabric and then cutting them out and sticking them on a background. We then roughly cut coloured squares to make a border and stuck them on too. What do you think of the results? These will be layered tomorrow and then James and Jasmine will be doing the quilting on the sewing machine. I suggested they choose to either do green lines top to bottom to suggest seaweed or blue lines side to side to suggest water. It doesn't matter in either case if the lines are not straight.

Aimee's Fairy Quilt

Well, I have three quilt tops completed, waiting for quilting (apart from the final border on two of them, but lets not be picky). So what does any self respecting quilter do? You've got it, she starts another quilt. Our grand-daughter, Aimee will be five in February and all of our grand-children and all of my sister's grandchildren have got or will get a quilt from me for their fifth birthday. Aimee requested fairies and these two pictures show progress so far. Sarah took me to Thimbles and Threads in Upper Hutt last week where I spent up large on fairy fabric in pinks and greens. I've also pulled all the pale pink and green floral squares from my 5" square pile and this is what has grown. I know some of the points are cut off but I don't care and I'm pretty sure Aimee won't either, at least, not for a few years. Its because I sewed four 5" squares together and then cut them across the diagonal to make the triangles that set the squares with the stars in the middle on point.

I'm unsure what I will do about the middle section. I will applique a fairy onto the sky/grass background panel and will edge the panel in some fashion, either with the corners as shown or with some other border.

These are tasty

Janice's Rice Cakes:
3 cups cooked brown rice
3 eggs
1/3 cup grated tasty cheese (romano, parmesan, etc)
4 shallot cloves
1 tbsp tomato paste
1 tbsp oil (olive or rice bran)
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp hot pepper sauce

Mix the last 5 ingredients together to a paste in a small kitchen whizz or blender. Stir all ingredients together. Mixture should be sloppy. Spoon into paper muffin cases set into muffin trays. Cook 20-30 min at 160 deg C on fan bake. Yummy for lunch. Can be frozen and reheated.

Sewing Day

Wednesday is now sewing day - moved from Thursday. And that's just what I did today. I finished the blocks for the frame around the poem illustration and then I put it all together. The working drawing shows the words of the poem that the quilt will illustrate. The words and a lot more detail on the centre picture will be added with the quilting.

You can see the last three blocks I did, in the top right hand corner. They have a different look to the rest of them. That is because I had a long break between finishing the bulk of them and doing those last three. I had lost touch with them. I've made them without the plainer pieces that the others have. I wonder if I should remake them? Whaddya reckon?

okay, okay

I know I haven't posted for a while, that's because I've been hosting family, working hard and doing secret stuff in the sewing room.

We had Sarah, Chris, Aimee and Jessica to stay last weekend. I would have posted about that but we didn't take any photos and its a bit boring without photos. Then all my quilting time this week (which wasn't much, see the comment above) was taken up with completing a row on Audrey's Row by Row quilt. And I can't post pictures of that because she isn't allowed to know what is happening with her Row by Row until she gets it back. Suffice to say, it involved ripping patches out and resewing because I hadn't read her preferences properly.

And this weekend I've been doing more secret stuff but I'm going to show you anyway because I'm pretty pleased with it and I don't think Chris reads my blog. Hope not. Sorry Chris if you do but you'll be getting it soon anyway.

Our grand-daughters do some pretty nice artwork at times and one evening while they were visiting us, Chris was musing on how cool it would be to have some of it put on a t-shirt. I don't think he ever did anything about it but I decided to see what I could do for his birthday which is coming up soon. The first step was to scan the art, add their names and print it onto a vinyl transfer sheet. Then I ripped white fabric into a rough square and ironed the transfer onto the fabric. I ripped some fine calico into another, slightly larger rough square and layered these onto the front of a black t-shirt. After pinning a piece of vilene to the inside of the shirt, I machine sewed round the edges of both squares with a mock hand quilting stitch sewing through all four layers (white fabric, calico, t-shirt and vilene). A bit of a twiddle through the middle and then trim the vilene away from the back. Finished!