My kingdom for an apron!

One thing I've been wanting for a long time is a nice apron. Not just a generic style apron, but something pretty, classic and evocative. I want it to inspire me to bake. I want to feel like Martha Stewart or Nigella Lawson when I put it on.

Isn't it pretty?

I mentioned in a previous post that my girlfriends and I had been on a shopping trip to Spotlight the other week, and that I finally found a pattern that I liked (and on sale too, more importantly!) and some fabric that I LOVED. But in amongst all my other bits and pieces I just hadn't had a chance to get it started.

I also love that the pattern is multi size & multi design.. and do you love my fabric as much as I do?

Well! On Tuesday night, after I finished cutting shapes for my Hedwig owls I pulled my pattern out and cut out all the pattern pieces that I needed. On Wednesday night after finishing my owls I got my fabric out to press.

Pattern pieces pinned.. dammit, the fabric is folded the wrong way.

On Friday morning I went and laid out my fabric, laid out my pattern pieces, adjusted my fabric to minimise waste and finally pinned all my pattern pieces to the fabric. Then I realized that I'd folded it right sides out instead of right sides together! Argh! Oh well, it won't matter- all of the pieces are symmetrical. So I experimented with cutting my pieces out with my rotary cutter instead of scissors and how much quicker and easier is that?!

That was quick! I love my rotary cutter.

Then I had to set aside my sewing so that I could go to a soy wax candle making workshop with some girlfriends (as blogged on Needles in the Haystack).

After my fragrant excursion Bean, Blossom and I headed back over to my mother-in-law's to show her the candles, have a cup of tea and have her amuse the kids while I holed myself up in my sewing room. I prepared the pockets and attached them to the skirt, then I pressed and hemmed the skirt.

"Easing" the corners while pressing

One pocket all done!

Two pockets all done!

Pockets sewn on. Can you see them? Neither can I.

Pressing the hem on the skirt

After I'd pinned the lace to the skirt I realized that it was quite late and I really needed to take the kids home for bed and cook dinner for my ever patient husband!

Lace all pinned and ready to sew

I'd hoped to finish it off today, but with dancing concert rehearsals, tee ball "meet the coach" day and a "reward" visit to our local indoor play center, the day has just disappeared on me! But there's always tomorrow, right?

Taking shape..

We went over to my MIL's last night for dinner, so after dessert I snuck off into my craft room to play with Flo (the Accuquilt GO!). During my excursion to Spotlight last Friday (previously referred to in my post on Needles in the Haystack) I found some textured white cotton fabric that looked perfect (if a little thin) to make my Hedwig owls out of (for Bean's Harry Potter quilt). 

I decided that if I added some interfacing to make it a little heavier, it would be perfect, and easier to manage than trying to double the layers for thickness. So I estimated the amount of fabric I'd need to use for Flo to cut all the pieces, cut a piece of interfacing to match and then ironed it before putting Flo through her paces.

All my Hedwig pieces cut out

 Two rolls through later, all my pieces were cut! And then I looked at my scraps and thought "I really should save the pieces that could go through the GO! again"... I trimmed them into pieces and popped them into a zip-lock bag for use at some other time. I impressed myself with my thriftiness.. pieces that I normally wouldn't have kept because they were too small for anything useful are now completely perfect for things like my Rose of Sharon die!

Left: To keep. Right: To ditch.

Then it was time to find some fabric from amongst my HP "coordinating" fabric squares to surround and finish off my little Hedwig blocks. Because I'm making 4x Hedwigs, one for each corner of the quilt I was hoping that I would have enough of one type of fabric to do them all. Sadly, I was ONE SQUARE short of being able to do it all in the sparkly dark blue fabric. But never mind, I can do two in dark sparkly blue and two in medium sparkly blue.

Blue sparkly squares waiting to be cut

And now all my blocks for Hedwig are cut! Look at me GO!

 I must say that I was super impressed by how little time it took me to cut my fabric.. I spent more time trying to work out which contrasting fabrics to use (I had other fabric choices aside from the plain blue sparkly, but I thought they might detract from Hedwig and that just wouldn't do!) than I did cutting them. Then I cut 4x 1" squares from orange fabric (from offcuts that Phillipa cut for me.. same fabric as the top shown on Needles in the Haystack) for the beaks and laid out all my fabric pieces so I could get a mental image of how she would look.

Hedwig with all her pieces (unassembled, obviously!)

Flo with her seatbelt on, ready for her first playdate!

Then today was Stitch 'n' Bitch Tuesday, so I took my crochet over to Kym's only to have the girls ask me if I'd bought Flo with me.. which I had not. So off I went to pick up Flo, a die or two and some fabric scraps so I could demonstrate her to the girls. They were impressed by her portable size - they'd envisaged something much bigger.. and were absolutely floored when I popped a few scraps onto my Rose of Sharon die, ran it through and then showed them all the flowers and leaves I'd cut in the space of 25 seconds. I forgot to take a photo of my scrappy flowers though! (And once again, I went through all the scraps and cut the small RoS circles out of the pieces that were large enough so that I minimised my waste! I'll have to find something to use all those flowers, leaves and circles on eventually)

Pinning the curves

After pinning my first piece of Hedwig together (below) it occurred to me that perhaps I should practice sewing the curves on some of my spare pieces, so one of my girlfriends, Nici, picked out two of my spare pieces (white & yellow, above) to be my test block.

One of Hedwig's heads (pinned) 

Looks like an egg, yes? Or maybe a birdie beak?

 I thought the white and yellow together looked like eggs, sunny side up. Nici saw a seagull. So then I "made" her a seagull by playing around with the block layout..

Head, beak, body, wings on the sides.. imagine two embroidered feet at the bottom

 Silly, I know.. but we had fun! And then sadly it was time to go to playgroup so we had to put aside our crafty projects, pack up and take the kiddies for *their* playdate!

Tomorrow is my local quilting friendship day, and I'm planning to go along (for the first time in about 3.5 years!) but I'm not sure what to take with me. I don't have enough pins (and it won't take all day just to pin) to sit and pin all my Hedwig pieces together, but I could pack up my sewing machine and take that with me and do pretty much what I used to do at the friendship day - sit in the corner on my sewing machine and not really talking to anyone else because I need to be near a power point!

If my tumbler die was here I could take Flo along and do double duty.. demonstrating how cool the GO! is to the girls at the friendship day, AND cut all my Harry Potter fabric squares into tumbler pieces. But I can't do that.. and I'm not sure yet what I'm doing to do with my other bits of fabric until I've seen how the tumbler pieces go together. (I really should get my husband to help me mock up an image of my quilt so that I can work it out properly instead of winging it!)

So what to take?? Maybe I could not take any quilting and take my apron fabric & pattern and cut that out instead. OR WAIT! I have it! I was going to wait for my strip cutter to come along so that I could do my Christmas table runner... but I could just use my value die to cut out my squares. And so, apparently tomorrow is the day that the Christmas table runner pattern that I bought at the friendship group 4 years ago will finally go from being a pattern to a project in progress. There we go.

Crocheted Wine Glass Covers

I must confess that I've had a thing for tea sets ever since my mum bought me 4x Royal Albert "Old Country Roses" tea cups. Having collected the actual tea set pieces, the one thing that has been missing is some good old fashioned jug covers for my milk jug and the jam & cream bowls.

So one of my aunties happened to have not one, but two books about crocheted jug covers and was able to point me in the direction of her local craft store, which was closing down and where I was able to purchase my own copies at 40% off! Yay!

Anyway, initially I didn't have any beads so I tried out the doily version of the jug cover that I really liked. It turned out quite nicely if I do say so myself (I haven't starched it yet). In the mean time I'd had this idea that instead of buying my girlfriends Christmas presents this year, I'd make them each a jug cover that they could use as a beaded doily or whatever they wanted. Then Spotlight had a 30% off everything sale, including their clearance items and I managed to pick up some beads that I liked, mostly for my girlfriends.. and at one of our regular Tuesday craft mornings I mentioned to one of my girlfriends that I'd bought some beads but wasn't sure which pattern to try so she helped me pick one out (haha, little does she know that it will be coming her way!) and I got started on it when I got home. I'm *finally* up to the final row, so it should be finished tonight.

The jug cover with 2 rows left to go..

Meanwhile, yesterday we made pasta (which I blogged about on our co-op blog Needles in the Haystack) and I took along my crochet bag (as you do!) and was showing the girls how it was shaping up when one of my non-crafty girlfriends, Nat passed comment that she needed one as a wine glass cover to keep the midgies out of her wine in summer! We all had a bit of a giggle about that (especially the part about her having any wine left for the midgies to land in!) but the girls suggested that if I marketed them as wine glass covers instead of jug covers that they'd walk out the door. Nat picked out a pattern and put her order in, so I guess if she product tests it successfully then (once I've finished all the Christmas present ones that the girls didn't know about) I can look at whipping some up and putting them on etsy to see if anyone else finds the novelty amusing..

Would you buy a crocheted wine glass cover to keep the midgies out of your wine in summer? Let me know what you think!