More holiday shopping

On Saturday I went back to Spotlight to check out what other quilting fabrics they had marked down - not with any particular expectations, mostly just curiosity! (And of course, the lure of their birthday celebrations - the kids were keen to get a "showbag" and have their faces painted)

As it happens I managed to find a co-ordinated range of fabrics "Tulips in Bloom" all on sale! Initially I'd set aside some other fabrics, not for any particular project but because they were cute (including a pink polka dot that I just HAD to have anyway - pic right at the bottom of the post) but there was this one fabric, a brown and blue floral that kept catching my eye... so I pulled it out and then noticed some other fabrics that matched.. checked the labels.. yep, same range! and started hunting for others. This was my final selection:

Tulips in Bloom, Blue & Brown

You might be able to just see the rabbits & birds hiding in the design

Tulips in Bloom - "Leaves"

Tulips in Bloom - "Petals"

Amusingly enough, the light blue "Petals" fabric is the one that I'd purchased on Thursday to make the Pillowcase Top for Blossom!

Co-ordinating homespun

Doesn't it look lovely? I can't wait to start cutting!

I was only going to buy 1/2 metre of each fabric because I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, but then I decided that I would use it to make a quilt top for my husband and me, which meant that I would need probably closer to a metre of each because we have a king-size bed.. and at $6/metre, why not?!

The pink polka dot that I just couldn't walk past

All up I had close to 13 metres of fabric, and for the bargain price of $72! Now all I need is a design..

Holiday shopping trips...

I've done lots of shopping this last week.. whenever we head up to visit my grandparents there is a standard list of places to visit:

* The second hand bookshop

* Katies 

* Rivers Clearance store

* Good Sammy's (thrift store)

* Spotlight (I know this sounds weird considering there are two Spotlight stores within a 30 minute drive of my house, but it's just what I do!)

This trip Mum and I added the local quilting store, farmers' market and the regional patchwork & quilting exhibition to our list as well. And I must say that we've had a very "successful" trip so far.. we head home tomorrow and we've actually managed to cross almost everything off our list! While I haven't specifically taken photos of the other things I've purchased, I found a top & 2 pair of pants at Katies, 2 pair of sandals & 2 shirts for my husband at Rivers, a Fred Bare pinafore and a pair of Clarks shoes for Blossom at Good Sammy's and we managed to trade 2 and a half bags of our own books in at the bookstore ($100 instore credit) for a bag of new books with no extra to pay! Woohoo!

But I *will* share with you my fabric/sewing related purchases with you:

Spotlight shopping trip #1 (Thursday)

 The local Spotlight was having a sale, with 30% off new release Christmas fabrics, buy 1 get 1 free patterns, $6 off Fat Quarter bundles and $6/metre clearance quilting fabrics (amongst other things!). It also turned out that today (Saturday) is their 5th birthday celebration, so they were running other specials/prizes/activities today and haf even more quilting fabrics still to be marked down so of course I had to schedule another trip for this morning. But more about that in a moment (or another post if this gets too long)..

Have I mentioned I have a thing for Holly fabric?

Pillowcase dress & pants pattern & fabric

 I found some cute strawberry print fabric on the quilting cotton clearance table as well as some blue checked fabric and another blue fabric that coordinated nicely (not the same range specifically) that I just couldn't walk past but couldn't justify without a project.. so I went and trawled through the pattern books for like an hour until I found 2 patterns that I thought I might like to add to my immediate project list. The first pattern was a pillowcase dress/top/pants collection that I thought would be lovely to make for Blossom. The top fabric (above) will be the main fabric for the top, with the strawberry print as the contrast panel at the bottom (see image D below) and the blue check fabric will be the pants, again with the strawberry print as contrast. I still have to go looking for ribbon though.

Another apron pattern - I plan to make design B 

Much as I love the apron that I made, I think it's too pretty to use every day, and I had originally wanted more of a smock type apron so when I found this Kwik Sew pattern I decided it would be perfect. I plan to use the strawberry print fabric I bought a while ago (before I found the rose print fabric and got sidetracked).

$6.95 - bargain!

I'm not sure why I bought the "Flat Fats Bundle" aside from the price, at $6 off it came down to $6.95 which made it hard to pass up. The top fabric is the same as the one I used for the beaks on my Hedwig the Owl blocks, and it makes me think of my friend Phillipa's daughter Miss J who LOVES orange.

And last but not least I found this cute Belle cross stitch pack for $3 so I thought I might do it up for Blossom to hang in her new bedroom.

I'll post about today's shopping trip later - right now I have to run off to buy wine and go to a seafood BBQ at my Aunt's house! Yummo!

Quilts for my babies (Part 2)

I was pregnant with Blossom while I was making Bean's quilt, so naturally once I finished his quilt I knew that I'd need to make another quilt straight away. This time I found a pattern from Lincraft (and let me tell you that I didn't have anywhere near as many problems with that pattern!) although I purchased the fabrics from Spotlight. The design was a little more complex than the one I'd made for Bean, but I was feeling much more confident and adventurous! (And when I say complex I feel I should point out that it wasn't very complex - just different sized squares and rectangles!)

As usual, I didn't follow the pattern exactly because I wanted the quilt to be about the same size as Bean's, and that meant that I had to play with the layout a little and add some extra blocks to make it fit the approximate dimensions.

I really enjoyed putting Blossom's quilt top together, and I absolutely LOVED the butterfly fabric. So much so that when I saw the same fabric in pink some months later  I just HAD to buy it to make some sheets for her cradle. I wish I'd bought more! Of course, by the time I'd finished my quilt top it was time for Blossom to make her appearance and it hadn't been quilted. Eventually when Blossom was about 6 weeks old one of the ladies at the quilting group very generously offered to take my quilt top and quilt it on her longarm quilting frame. She chose a lovely curvy wave design which was much better than anything that I could have come up with! One day I'll learn how to free motion quilt, but that's a project for another quilt...

Once I got the quilt top back it took me about 6-8 months to complete the binding, but eventually I did! Why did no one ever tell me about stitch in the ditch until AFTER I finished my quilts??
Both Blossom & Bean love their quilts, and it still makes me feel warm & fuzzy to see them in use. As I mentioned though, Bean is outgrowing his quilt and sadly, so is Blossom. So I guess once I've finished the Harry Potter quilt I will have to come up with a new quilt design for Blossom. Perhaps something in the divine Riley Blake "Sweet Divinity" fabric that I ordered from Stitch Steals.

One of the other things on Blossom's bed is a cushion (Laura Ashley fabric) that my mommy made for me when I was a little girl. She also made me matching curtains for my room. I don't think we still have the curtains, but it's kind of sweet that Blossom has the cushion on her bed now.

Quilts for my babies (Part 1)

While on holidays I thought I would take the opportunity to reflect on and share the quilts that I made for Blossom & Bean.. and because I have a tendancy to ramble I've split them into two separate posts so that you won't be here all night!

The first "real" quilt I ever made was for Bean. A girlfriend and I had decided to make a cot quilt for another friend's baby shower after finding one of those tear & share patterns at Spotlight. The whole thing was a bit of a debacle, partly because almost all of the measurements were wrong (for example, the typo that said we needed 85cm x 11cm of wadding instead of 85cm x 110cm.. and even the 85x110 was wrong, btw!) and partly because we were both inexperienced when it came to quilting.. infact my girlfriend was a complete sewing novice!

Anyway, we ended up with about 3 times too much fabric (instructions said 1/2 metre per fabric and we only needed 15cm max). After making the horrendous cot quilt (really, it was terribly embarrassing!) my girlfriend and I started attending my local quilting friendship group having decided to use the leftover fabric to make quilt tops for both out little boys (and yes, we had enough of the print fabric to do both quilt tops - which were also about 2-3 times the size of the original cot quilt design... and I still have a little bit of fabric left over!).

The girls at my local quilting group were lovely, so welcoming and willing to share their knowledge and expertise! They taught me so much about quilting -for example, how to chain piece, what binding was & how to make it etc. In virtually no time my quilt top was complete and I was experimenting with machine quilting. I stuck to the basics and went with diagonal lines, but I can't begin to tell you how proud I was when that quilt was finished!

My girlfriend never ended up completing her quilt. Infact it's still sitting in my craft cupboard. The problem with hers was that she wasn't quite as pedantic about accuracy when cutting & sewing as I was and as a result her rows ended up skewed. Very skewed. She gave up, and at the time I was too busy trying to work out what I was doing myself. She's pregnant with baby #2 now though and I've considered pulling the quilt top out and trying to work out if I can salvage it without having to pull the whole thing apart (because that would be WAY too much effort). I was thinking something along the lines of appliqueing some baby rattles/bears/sheep etc over the joins so that you don't notice as much. I haven't actually looked at it in quite some time.. but it's on my to do list!

Meanwhile, Bean still uses his quilt virtually every night. He's using it right now, as it happens! We take it on holidays, and it's always at the end of his bed incase he's too cold. But he's outgrowing it, and not just size-wise. Because it was leftover baby fabric is really is a *baby* quilt. One day he will wake up, look at his quilt, then tell me that he can't use it anymore because he is a big boy. And then I will be sad. So instead I decided that if I made him a new, bigger quilt that I could side-step the rejection heartbreak! And that is why I'm making the Harry Potter quilt.

But I'm still proud of my first "real" quilt.

It's finished!

I finally got over my annoyance and unpicked the stitching on the waistband. It wasn't so bad as I'd originally thought and I only had to re-stitch half. The pattern said to slipstitch the back side of the waistband, but I ended up top stitching the right side of the waistband so that it sat nicely instead.

The topstitched waistband

The completed bodice

The final thing to do was to sew the button holes & buttons. I realised at this point that despite having checked more than once, I'd sewn the bodice onto the skirt backwards. You can only tell if you look at the lace closely.. isn't it annoying when you do something silly like that?? 

 Meanwhile it's been quite some time since I've sewn a buttonhole, so I grabbed my sewing machine manual and referred to the instructions.. there's a time for flying by the seat of your pants, and a time for making sure you don't stuff things up! I used some of my selvage offcuts to practice some buttonholes first, which was a good idea seeing as I needed to adjust my stitch length & width to suit. I'm so glad I didn't take a lazy shortcut, especially as the first "real" buttonhole still looked a bit funny (because of the added bulk of the lace that hindered the fabric feeding properly) although the buttons went on like a dream. Thank goodness!

All buttoned up!

 One of the added bonuses to this pattern appears to be that if you're in the mood you can just let the bodice hang down (you can see the ends peeking out, but when it's done up it doesn't) and just wear it as a half-apron. Which would be handy if I were someone else... my main problem is usually that something splashes onto my top, which is why I need the bodice in the first place!

And so here she is! All finished and complete! And as Bean pointed out, I only have two more to make now (one for him.. in a different design of course! and one for Blossom). I finished the apron just in time to pack it to take on holidays.. Blossom, Bean, my mom and I are heading off on a road trip in the morning to visit my grandparents for a few days. There could be no better opportunity to test out/break in my new apron than with some holiday cooking/baking!

Oh Sweet Divinity...

Another website I've come across in my blog-reading travels is Stitch Steals. It's kind of like a Scoopon/Catch of the Day style website but for fabric! Seriously! So while the "steal of the day" didn't particularly catch my attention I decided to check out their "past steals" and I found some gorgeous Riley Blake fabrics that I'd previously "favourited" on etsy! I just love that beautiful Sweet Divinity..

And for $2.99 for a 1/2 yard I just couldn't say no. I ended up ordering a yard of each fabric (as pictured) and even with shipping it still only worked out to be ~$10/yard which is about half the price I'd probably pay locally! I'm not sure what I'll do with it yet, but Blossom has been asking why she isn't getting a Harry Potter quilt, so I might do her a pretty new something for her new bedroom.. 

They also had some other gorgeous fabrics, but I thought my husband might not appreciate me maxing out the account on fabric I don't *need* just because it was on sale... but there's always next week!

Tumbling along

Saturday night we went over to my mother-in-law's for dinner, so of course I took the opportunity to escape into my sewing room and work on my apron.. I was perhaps a little optimistic in thinking that I'd actually get it finished, and ultimately the sewing gremlins came along and made sure that didn't happen!

Bodice sewn, curves clipped

 First I basted the lace onto one piece of the bodice before sewing the bodice together... I turned it in the right way to find that one piece of lace had gotten caught so I had to unpick that section, move the lace as far out of the way as possible and re-sew it. Problem solved.

Bodice in the right way, pressed, topstitched and basted

I pressed the bodice, stitched around the edges to keep it all nice and flat, basted the bottom edge and then pinned it to my skirt.. I was so careful not to catch the wrong bits of the waistband and had it all looking perfect.. until I turned it over..

Bodice attached to the skirt

*sigh*

 The waistband got caught in my stitching. And my un-picker was at my house, not in my sewing room. So I got annoyed and decided that was the end of the apron for the evening. But wait! I had new toys to play with.. so let's crank up Flo the GO and try out my brand spanking new tumbler die! *huge sigh of relief* My fabric squares fit perfectly.

Playing around with my theoretical layout (clearly not to scale)

I pulled out my backing fabric and my Hedwig owls so that I could get a (very) rough idea of the layout that was in my head. I ended up deciding that the tumblers will need to be sashed, probably with the backing fabric because when they were butted up against each other they merged into an undefined blob.. and that wasn't really the look I was going for.

Looks much better with the blocks apart, yes?

Then yesterday I went over after school and spent some time cutting and placing more tumbler blocks to get an idea of how I might actually lay them out. I have a significantly larger amount of harlequin style blocks than any other, and I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do about that as far as layout goes... does it matter if I have them adjoining, or should I try and keep them apart?

Also, if anyone has any tips on how I go about sashing the tumbler blocks I'm all ears, otherwise I'll just follow my instincts and we'll see what happens!