Cards and bookmarks

We had a public holiday here on Wednesday and I chose to make it a free day. That is, no chores, no homework just something for fun. Someone at my quilt group the week before had asked if anyone had a cricut machine and it made me realise I hadn’t used mine for a while, or even explored the full potential of the machine. I don’t want it to be an expensive paper weight so I decided to drag out all my supplies and make Wednesday a papercraft day. I started with bookmarks and moved onto Christmas cards using a bunch of Christmas cut outs that came with a magazine many years back.

It was an interesting experiment in what I enjoy, because while the out of the box cards and book marks are lovely I had the most fun when I was putting my own stamp on things.

Last bag class

Yesterday was the final in my series of six bag making classes. This session was the ByAnnie Open Wide 2.0. I love the fabrics I used for this one, but getting the binding on that zip was fiddly and am not really happy with the quality of the finish in that area but decided I need to stop being a perfectionist and accept it as practice.

Exploding heart quilt

I’m not usually a pattern person, but next on my to do list is the exploding heart quilt (pattern by slice of pi). I just loved the look of this one.

I’m all cut out and 2 rows together. It was 3 but I had to unpick the last one because I put it on upside down. The down side to the pattern is that there are 6 different block types and each row has to have the right type of block in exactly the right position (and way up), so you need to pay lots of attention. One of the few times I regret not having a design wall.

A bigger worry is, I made all the right number of blocks and stacked them into piles for each row…

…but I still have blocks left over.

I’m going to have to triple check the rows before I sew them to figure out where I have gone wrong.

Second last bag class

It’s been a busy weekend. I had my second last bag class yesterday followed by a family lunch. The rest of the weekend has been taken up with homework for a course I am doing. I signed up for an Introduction to Computer Science and am learning to code. It’s a bit nerve wracking as I have no background in this kind of thing. My final assignment will be to build my own app from scratch, and I get a choice about what it does so I am trying to think about what apps might be useful for quilting.

Anyway, I will leave you with pictures of the finished bag from my bag class. It’s the Just in Case bag by ByAnnie.

Elephant Abstractions

Finally finished this, from the Elephant Abstractions pattern and kit from Violet Craft. The original background fabric was blue so I switched it out for an orange and used the blue for the back. I wasn’t sure about how to quilt so just went with straight lines like in the picture on the pattern, and it worked out ok. I thought it might be distracting but its not, even though my lines aren’t quite straight.

Purple

My quilt group colour challenge for June is purple. As I have a few other projects on the go, I thought I would whip up a small project pouch. When done, I wasn’t really satisfied with it. The colours don’t look too bad but the workmanship leaves a lot to be desired, especially around the binding. Trying to machine stitch a binding down around a zip is fiddly.

However, when I had the material out, I thought the fabric would look really good as a mini nine patch so… this happened.

I didn’t have enough of the dark purple to make it any bigger, but it’s a decent crib size quilt for the next baby who needs a gift. Now I just have to pin and quilt it before the end of June.

Bag making

I had the third of my series of 6 bag making classes this morning and feeling quite proud of myself. It went off pretty well. Still think I need a bit more attention to detail to make sure all my topstitching lines are straight and my binding goes on a bit tidier.

Today’s effort was the ByAnnie Stash and Dash fold-over organiser. Now I just need to figure out what to use it for.

I also finished this origami bag from a kit that I bought a while ago. It was a pretty simple bag to make but I just love the fabric in this one.

Writers block

I’m not sure why, but I’ve been sitting here for 15 minutes trying to think about something to blog about. Before that I went and had a nap. It’s not that there is nothing to write about, I’m sure there is plenty. It’s just I can’t figure out what is at the front of my mind.

I don’t know that things have been busy. There is work of course and I have actually left the house two weekends in a row for craft events. Which has been pleasant but I will need to rearrange my stash at some point to be able to fit the extra purchases in after I overindulged in fabric (or make something to use it up). I also, for some reason, decided to sign up for an online course which is taking way more time than it should, but I have also spent a good amount of time reading and stitching and have managed to get one of my cross stitch kits finished. Not sure the picture does it justice, but here it is.

Slow weekend

The last long weekend in our series of long weekends here and it has kind of been a slow one with what feels like not much done, though I know a few things got ticked off the list. I guess it probably just feels unproductive because my big goal for the weekend was to finish my latest painting project and so far not a single brush has been raised. However, I did get through a bit of YouTube watching, a novel and am making some progress on my elephant quilt. I have a stack of blocks ready to go.

I am finding the foundation piecing to be just a little wasteful and have a huge tub of trimmings. I guess I could make a second copy of the templates and use them as cutting templates so I could get a piece of fabric closer to the needed size but that’s a lesson for another quilt. For now I am going to have to think of a use for all the trimmings – maybe make a cushion stuffed with scraps or something.

Paint pouring

Because of the timing of Easter last weekend and some normal public holidays we have in April and May we have wound up with 3 long weekends in a row. Currently on the second of these and I would like to say that I am getting lots of sewing done but so far most of my time has been spent on chores and visiting family. The plus side is I am almost finished painting my hallway and kitchen (only one more coat to go).

I did manage to work in some fun on Good Friday though when two friends came over and we had lunch and tried some paint pouring. I’ve tried this before and really messed it up because I didn’t realise how long the paint took to try and ended up with finger prints in the middle of my work. This time I was a little more careful and got mixed results. Some I like, others not so much. One of my friends who does a lot of mixed media work also brought a couple of different mediums to try. The glitter medium (I think it was Jo Sonjas Opal Dust) worked really well and created some really interesting mineral like effects.

They are all different sizes and I think I am going to try and varnish some of the smaller ones and use them as coasters.