Category Archives: Other Craft

No-vember

So. While I was out…

It turned out that No-vember meant not only (almost)No-blogging, but also (almost)No-stitching. Not a single cross was stitched with these hands in November (shock!), but I did get to and finish the girl-elf I showed you back here, and made a good start on boy-elf. Pics when they’re both finished.

Also, I did some crafty gift making for a couple of the small people in my life. I don’t think either of their mums read my blog, so I can show:

First up, I made a kitty version of Sara Bear, who will go to sweet Lilly. I hope she likes her. Finn has named her ‘Heart Love Kitty’ on account of the hearts in her shoes (uh… which you cannot see… so I guess that makes little sense to mention!)

Heart Love Kitty
(Pattern by Hillary Lang)

Next up, a crayon roll for Mr A, Dermot’s nephew. This was fun. I made two – the other one for Finn and Niamh, and it had mysteriously vanished by the time I came to take these pics.

Crayon Roll

Crayon Roll
(Based on the tutorial at Skip to my Lou, via Sew, Mama, Sew).

Finally, I whipped up a last minute (11pm, November 30) advent calendar-ish thing to round out the month. We’re also doing the Lego advent calendar this year, because we just looooove Lego around here (except notsomuch when coming across it with bare feet in the dark.) The one I made is simple little felt bags of chocolate goodies, tied with a pretty ornament which goes on the tree (or will, at least). Ornaments from Allsorts.

Advent Fun

Oh oh, looks like there’s an imminent break-in!
The Break In

Hope you’re all having a great weekend 😆

Felty

Sunday morning cuppa. (Milo, for the curious. Best with honey.)
Donut-cuppa
Mmmm… Donut.

Fooled? No? Look closer:
Donut - closer look

Niamh followed her own tradition of absconding with the crafty goodness:
Donut-thief

Don’t worry, I saved her before she managed to stick the needle in her mouth 😆

PS. Should you feel the need to make your own delicious pincushion/kiddie playfood – mine is based on the Craftster tutorial found here. Enjoy!

Makin’ Stuff II

Until a few days ago, we had in our house this scary looking thing:
DollPram-before
(I refer to the one on the right, not either of the others, though the one in the middle scares me a little too!)

That weird koala-headed thing is a doll stroller from years back – best guess is it belonged to my sister. The frame is still in good shape, however the cover has never fitted well, and, though I don’t think you can make it out clearly here, has been held together with string, rubber-bands, a nappy-pin and a big wad of blutac. When Finn started trundling his teddies around in it a couple of years back, I promised I would try and make a new cover. So… now you see how bad my procrastination can really be! 😥

When Niamh started getting interested in Baby Jack (Scary Doll), I idly thought of buying a new stroller. A quick trip through Toy Kingdom assured me that I could have a new dolly pusher, as long as I wanted it in, lets see… pink, pink, or, oh yes… PINK! Anyway, I bit the bullet and decided it couldn’t possibly be that difficult to sew a new cover, after all. Oh yes, and some bright spark decided it might be fun to have a reversible cover, what’s more. (That would be me. D’oh.)

Some time and many curse words later, after staying up until midnight on Monday finishing the thing… and then finishing it some more on Tuesday while Niamh was napping… aaaand then finally finishing it some more after picking Finn up from pre-school, we have one super-dooper swanky new cover (and one cute boy who isn’t too cool to be photographed with his teddybear):

DollPram-after1-lg

(yes, I know. It’s pink. Oh well.)

But wait, that’s not all:

DollPram-after2
DollPram-after3-lg

Ta da! It’s also green and blue. Hooray! (See – I’m not really anti-pink, I’m just pro-choice 😉 )

I tried to convince Niamh to take it for a test drive, but she decided to go with a mechanical inspection instead. That’s my girl!

DollPram-after4-lg

Sick of Bibs Yet?

Applebib
The examination of a freesia she picked moments earlier from our front lawn. (Yes, lawn – they’ve gone wild, can’t get rid of them… thinking of just strewing more seed around so that it looks purposeful!)

This is my favourite of the bibs I’ve made for Niamh – the Spotlight lady astutely observed ‘you must be a green person’. Well, yes, yes I am. I love this little apple print, I should go back and buy more for a summer dress. There was rotary cutting and piecing involved with this bib… d’you think I’m getting ever more closer to that ‘quilt within’?

Before I made the sewing machine give up its place at the kitchen table (having no permanent sewing spot is a bit of a bummer), I made a half dozen more bibs – a couple for a friend of ours and more for Niamh. She came out yesterday morning to discover the pile, and was most distraught when she couldn’t wear one immediately – I hadn’t hammered in the press studs the night previously for fear of waking the kids. Life couldn’t continue until I banged in a press stud and popped it on her – I think we had six changes of bib yesterday, the little fashion fiend!

Bounce Bounce, Zzzzzz

I’m an Auntie! Well, a step-Auntie if you want to be a pedant, but I don’t. My sister Imogen had her first baby in the wee hours of this morning. A beautiful baby girl, Lilly Jessica :love: Niamh and I made the four-hour round trip to see her this afternoon. Mog looked thoroughly exhausted (bub was born by c-section after a long and arduous labour), but I’m sure she’ll be fine, and Lilly was just lovely. Niamh was well behaved and even let me have a few baby snuggles.

I spent last night making a few more bibs – three for Lilly (cute gender neutral ones, since I still didn’t know which variety of baby she would be at that point), and another for Niamh. (Marita and Karen, I will definitely try and get you an action shot, soon. Niamh was being a most uncooperative model the other day, and courtesy of all the dribble, all the bibs are currently in the washing pile!)

And now… I’m exhausted myself. I’m off in search of a better night’s sleep than last night, then tomorrow I’m off to Tannia’s to chill out for a little while.

Makin’ Stuff

Yup. Still here, still kicking. Still stitching (but shhh, it’s a secret, can’t tell yet), and today, making bibs.

Bibs-l

This post might have been titled ‘5-minute bibs’, had I not tried to sew while my ‘helpers’ were around. I didn’t think ’45-minute bibs’ was quite so catchy. Honestly… who tries to sew with a 4 year old and a toddler in the house and awake?!

I’ve been meaning to get around to making some bibs for Niamh since forever, as she is quite seriously the drooliest baby ever to walk the Earth. Really.

There have been bibs popping up in some of my favourite blogs lately, too. So when the machine got dragged out to finish off my exchange piece today, I pulled out a few cute cotton prints and some towelling, traced an existing bib of Niamh’s as a pattern, and (some time later) voila! – three cute new bibs. Niamh approves. Terrible photo though – sorry!

Show & Tell

With the exception of today, Melbourne put on a lovely show of weather this week. Yesterday afternoon, while Niamh was sleeping off a bad case of the grumpies (please let it be teething, oh please let it be teething – I can’t cope if she’s going into the tantrummy-twos already), Finn and I sat under this:
BackyardTree

Finn (with liberal amounts of help) worked on this:
ByFinn
I worked on this:
(which incidentally I finished off tonight, but the photos I took were a bit on the crappy side, so I’ll have another try in some decent light over the weekend).
SimpleLife

Later, I went along to this (you can spot me in one of the pics on the blog if you squint), and I stitched on this for a bit:
ElfGirl

Fun fun. The design is an ’06 Christmas freebie by Hillary Lang, and there is a matching boy-elf, so I’ll be stitching the pigeon pair to make up as Christmas gift bags for the kiddos. Cute, huh?

Have a great weekend – we’re off up north to celebrate Fathers’ Day with multiple fathers!

Catching Up: Part I

Well. Our Easter break was… slightly more than we bargained for, since our car ended up in parts in my father-in-law’s front paddock for several days!

When we arrived on Thursday afternoon, we had planned to do a fairly simple strut replacement job before heading off camping. As soon as FIL got a look at the underneath of the car, it rapidly turned into a drive-shaft-rebuild-needed-asap job. One of the drive shafts turned out to be a bugger to detach, so we weren’t able to get them into the rebuild place before everything shutting down for the long weekend. Nevermind… we loaded our considerable cargo into a trailer and FIL’s car, and took off from Friday through Monday for a lovely few days of riverfront camping.

On Tuesday morning, we had the drive shafts rebuilt, then FIL and OtherHalf spent the afternoon getting the car back in working order. And here we are, back again. Chocolate-bloated and laden with half a ton (it seems) of dirty laundry, but back.

Here then, are some promised catch up pictures. First, the two pay-it-forward packages I didn’t show you earlier:

For Angi
PIF-Angi
For Debbi
PIF-Debbi

Next, the final UFO that I stitched on for the round robin. This is Tracey’s Royal Holiday. It was nice to finish on another Mirabilia design:

Before:
UFO-RR-Tracey-1
And after:
UFO-RR-Tracey-2

And that, boys and girls, marks the end of so-called ‘obligation‘ stitching for me. For the time being, anyway. I joined this round robin because I knew I would go through a bit of a stitching slump while Niamh was little, and I figured this would be a good way to spur me into doing a little bit, better than nothing at all. But I have to confess, I’m not sad to see then end of it. I was growing a bit resentful of the time spent stitching on other people’s work (though I will no doubt feel differently once my own UFO gets home, and I see first-hand how much has been worked on it). Each time as the deadline approached, I felt pressured to stitch, even though I didn’t necessarily feel like doing so. I have done very little other stitching for the whole year so far – I completed the Hardanger exchange, I’ve spent a couple of hours on Lilly, and just in this last week I’ve come very close to a finish on one of my smaller pieces (hopefully I’ll dance this weekend). But that’s all. So I’ve decided to opt out of any more exchanges or round robins for at least the rest of 2007. How much or how little stitching I will actually do, I can’t predict, but I just don’t want to feel the pressure of deadlines for a little while.

Show & Tell

Far overdue, may I show you in full the hardanger exchange which I stitched for Jenny. You can see it hanging on the wall in her post – here’s a slightly different angle for interest:
Hardanger Exchange

Or, you can get up close and personal with the stitching here. Although I thought finishing it as a ‘wall ornament’ was kind of uninspired (hey, I was really tired!), I was really happy with the quality of my finishing. I have a bag (or, um, three) of finished-but-not-finished projects which I’d really like to start making a dent in – Anne and Karen have started up the Focus on Finishing blog, have you seen it? That should provide me with some inspiration.

The reason I’ve taken so long to post this is because my ‘spare’ time (insert maniacal laugh here) has been taken up with Suz’s UFO for the Round Robin. She sent around Black Swan’s Lily Pond Dreams. Confetti stitching ahoy! It kicked my butt, and once again I didn’t achieve as much as I would have liked. Here are the before ‘n’ afters, clickable for biggering.
UFO-RR-Suz-1UFO-RR-Suz-2

And, just in case you aren’t all pictured out, here are pics of the three pay-it-forward packages that I know have arrived. (Should check up on the other two – Angi, Debbi, are yours there yet?). I dyed a fat 1/8 of linen or evenweave, and some stranded cotton (plus a perle for Jenna) for each person in their colour preferences. So far, so good, everyone seems to like these:

For Jenna
PIF-Jenna
For Tash
PIF-Tash
For Jinger
PIF-Jinger

Phew! I think that’s about it.

Sara Bear

Nope, I haven’t ‘gone over to the dark side’ :giggle: Not just yet, anyway. You know how people say everyone has a novel in them? Well, I don’t think I have a novel in me, but I do think I might have a quilt in me… somewhere. When and how it will choose to emerge, I don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see. Meanwhile, that clue was a bit deceptive. I only used one of those fabrics in this project. I have plans for some of the others, and still more I bought ‘just because they’re pretty’. I have wanted to start building a bit of a craft fabric stash for a while, to entice me back into sewing.

And here she is. Out among the garlic chives and aubergines, enjoying the sunshine, showing off her candy pink Mary Janes – my weekend happy dance: Ms Sara Bear. (Or Sara Beara if, like Finn, you prefer.)

Sara Bear

The pattern is from the Put Together Book #1 (Kitty, Bunny & Bear) by the very clever Hillary Lang at Wee Wonderfuls. I’m pretty happy with how she turned out, though I didn’t get a nice curve on her ears (Finn, being the very literal boy he is, wanted to call her ‘Square-Ears Bear’!) The shoes are removable, and a good thing too, else Niamh would have chewed them off by now. She (Niamh) isn’t much into soft toys as comfort items, but she does seem to think Sara Bear is a pretty good plaything, so I think I have a winner 🙂