Symposium

Next year is the National Quilt Symposium - these happen every two years and next year's is in Queenstown, one of New Zealand's premium tourist destinations. I registered my interest directly after the last one as I have for the last three but I didn't really think I would be able to go. I didn't get to the last one in 2009 either. However, the cards fell right and my good luck was to be invited to join Helen in the motel room she had booked months ago. So I'm going! and I'm very excited about it too :-)

We thought that it would be a good idea for the girls from Wanganui to have a t-shirt so we shopped yesterday and found a red singlet tunic that suited us both. NB: we don't know of any other club members attending symposium but if you are reading this and you are attending and would like a t-shirt - please let me know!) The shirt we chose has a picture on the front (black, silver cityscape) but it was getting difficult to find exactly what we wanted so we decided that we could put our logo on the back. We chose a singlet tunic so that we could wear other t-shirts under it and hopefully could wear it every day. I played with our Cotton-On Quilters logo on the design programme and came up with something I thought was fairly decent. I printed a couple out on to transfer paper and ironed them onto plain white cotton. Here is mine, sewed on with two rows of (stylishly) careless heavy black stitching.

Jasmine's picture

My seven year old great-niece draws the best pictures! They are beautifully designed and have lovely detail. She sent me this picture of herself playing soccer last week with her stepmother and little baby brother in a baby buggy in the background. I think that may be her older brother playing soccer too but I'm not sure about that. Look at the sun wearing spectacles! And the lovely action of the players.

Anyway, I wanted to make her something special with her artwork and decided to look at the t-shirts in town to see what I could find. I found a long tunic with a vinyl transfer in four parts so I printed two copies of her picture onto a t-shirt transfer sheet and ironed them onto fine white cotton. Then I sewed them onto two of the sections on the t-shirt. I used the small stipple stitch on my pfaff machine and I used embroidery tearaway on the back of the t-shirt fabric to give it stability while I stitched. Do you think she'll like it? It looks very large but I think its meant to be worn with leggings and maybe a belt.

Treasures

We had sole charge of our two little grand-daughters for a week so nothing much happened on the blogs or in the sewing room until this weekend when they returned home to Wellington. It was a lovely fun week. Terry and I shared the day-to-day care and entertainment. Both girls were charming!

As you can see, the little A4 size quilt has now grown to twice its size with borders added. And its still not finished. It needs more quilting and I'm interested to see what sort of edge finishing it will have. I'm not sure about the red shadow under the bowl either - I might darken it down with some black paint.

My other project was to freshen up a recycled zipped sweatshirt. It cost me $8.99 at "The Mill" and its 80% cotton, in excellent condition. I appliqued a few foxglove spikes on the front and I think it will become a favourite this spring.

Two into one goes very nicely - twice!

Late last winter I bought four 100% cotton long-sleeved T-shirts in the Postie Plus sale. After a few washes they had gone wide and short as such shirts tend to do. (I know that if you buy cotton shirts mixed with 5-10% elastane they don't lose their shape nearly as much but they weren't in the sale.) And at the time the fashion was for barely hip length tops which only looked good when they were skin tight. So these shirts, now not skin tight and not even hip length didn't look so good when I tried them on last week when the weather was a bit cooler. I thought I would have to run a overlock down the side seams to take some of the width out of them. But the fashion for longer shirts is returning so I thought well, while I have them in the sewing room what about a remake? And look what I got - two lovely, long hip-hugging, hip (and backside) covering shirts with sleeve and neck detail. You've gotta love the current fashions for layering and for unfinished edges which makes this sort of remake very easy!

Blue Cushion

In my last post I told you about scanning my dad's slides. I wanted to get them done now because I am going to visit my parents next week. When I do it will be with Sarah and Aimee and Jessica and we will all be flying up to Auckland to stay with my sister before visiting Mum and Dad for the day.

I have made this cushion as a thank you gift for my sister and I chose the photo from the ones I scanned as it is the right colours for her dining room. It is a bit overstuffed as I have used a cushion insert from one of my cushions in order to take the photos. I'll buy a more appropriately sized insert tomorrow. You can see I have used the ripped edge, layered method that I used for framing the artwork on Chris' t-shirt.

Oh,

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

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!

What am I going to wear??

Deciding what to pack for the trip is always fraught. It gives me sleepless nights! (I know, I know, you wish you had my problems!) I don't like to take too much because I know I'll buy more while I'm away, but I want to be prepared for a range of temperatures and situations (business, travel, sightseeing, eating out). I want all my shirts (3 sleeveless, 2 short sleeved), cardigans (1 casual, 1 evening) and jackets (1 dressy, 1 rain) to go with all my trousers (1 cargo, 1 light denim, 1 dressy) and skirts (1 light)... and this time its complicated by the fact that I've lost nearly 20 kg since the end of last year and I don't have many summer clothes that fit me. I need to pack summer clothes because we are travelling to the northern hemisphere but its winter here and its winter clothes I've been buying over the last couple of months as I came down a couple of dress sizes. I've had some clothes given me by my daughter and I'll take some of them. One pale pink t-shirt she gave me had long, flared sleeves and I decided today to cut them short and make it into a summer shirt. Here is the end result. I've cut the sleeves off, and hemmed them so the cut edge hangs lower than the hem. I also added some decoration by ironing interfacing to a piece of patterned silky material. I cut the motifs from the fabric and stuck them on the shirt with vliesofix. I then free-motion stitched over the motifs. I imagine the edges of the motifs will fray once its washed but I stitched very close to the edge so that should be ok. The black "stitching" on the pink shirt is actually drawn on with a fine pigma pen.