My first quilt top finished!

I have now finished the top layer of my first quilt (see photos above). I am pretty happy with how it has progressed especially for my first attempt at making a quilt! Now I need to choose a backing fabric, binding fabric and the padding for the middle and figure out how to put the whole quilt 'sandwich' together. My little helpers were actively involved in a lot of the quilt making, which was obviously quite exhausting for them (see photo below).

Starting my first quilting project!

Back in January 2011 I was all inspired to start getting into quilting...and I bought a couple of great looking books about making quilts and my first 'jelly roll' of quilt fabric on ebay. Finally, a year later I have started making my first quilting project. I'm following the 'bars of gold' pattern from the book called "Jelly Roll Quilts" by Pam and Nicky Lintott and using the 'Wee Woodland' jelly roll fabric described here . Last year I initially had a grand plan to make a king-sized quilt as my first project, but now I have decided to just make a smallish quilt to master the basic techniques first, then work up to doing a massive quilt for our bedroom.

The jelly roll has 40 strips of fabric in it. I have sewn these together in batches of 5 strips each, ironed the seams, then cut 5 x 7inch sections from each of strips. Then the fun part of laying all the pieces on the floor and deciding which order to put them together in to make a nice random pattern. My little "helper" Puss seems happy with this layout (see photo). Next I'll need to stitch the pieces together vertically, and buy some fabric to make the borders and backing and binding etc.

Cushion covers

This weekend started off with picking up a surprise parcel at the post office -  Hannah had sent me a big stash of the most lovely wool, buttons and ribbons from America! The yarn is all 100% merino wool hand-dyed beautiful colours, and the buttons and ribbons match perfectly. What a lovely present! I can't wait to start knitting something with the wool!  I have been trying to finish off a scarf I'm making for a present, once that's done I plan to start making something with the gorgeous new wool. Thanks Hannah! :-)

This weekend I also made 2 new cushion covers - I've had the cushion inserts sitting in a box for years, and the fabric I bought about a year ago but somehow haven't actually sat down to make the covers until now. The  cushion covers are made from a dusky pink-brown striped fabric, so they kind of match our old pink couch set, and also the pink flowers on the other cushion covers I made over a year ago. Here's a photo of Boots surrounded by the cushions this afternoon :-)

Dusting off the sewing machine

This weekend I decided to pull the sewing machine out and have a go at making some cute baby slippers from a fun craft book called "Meet me at Mike's" by Pip Lincolne. I haven't done much sewing in a while, and have never tried to make these baby shoes before so I ended up making a 'trial' pair first, then a much more successful second pair. They look pretty cute. The blue turtle fabric is part of a huge surprise stash of gorgeous Japanese quilting material that my friend Hannah sent me last year. I love all the different Japanese designs, but so far haven't had the time or patience to make a proper quilt. Maybe now I've dusted off the sewing machine to make these slippers I might attempt a small bed quilt or a quilted pillow cover or something like that... :-) This weekend I also made a matching baby bib to go with the slippers. I simply covered the bottom half of a white bib with some more of the turtle fabric, made a hem and sewed around it. Very easy. Together the slippers and bib will be a present for a friend whose baby boy is due later this month.

I also can now post up a photo of another homemade Christmas present. I had an idea of making 'team Teleport' shirts for my brother and his girlfriend to wear on their little junk rig yacht 'Teleport'. I found the boxing kangaroo logo online, and figured out what I'd like the design to look like. Then rather than trying to cross-stitch the design by hand, I asked J's Mum if she would be able to 'digitize' the image and embroider the design using her fancy embroidery machine. She did this and the result was great!  The shirt colour I chose is a dark green to match the hull of their yacht. My brother and his girlfriend said they loved the shirts :-)

Goodbye 2011, Hello 2012!!

J and I spent a lovely week in Sydney over Christmas catching up with lots of my family and good friends and eating and drinking lots of delicious treats. We arrived back in Adelaide last night, just in time for the 40C heatwave forecast for the start of the new year!

Now that Christmas is over I can put up a few pictures of the cross-stitch tea towel/table runner that I made for my parents to use on their boat. I chose an assortment of whales, dolphins and colourful fish from a cool cross-stitch pattern book full of sea creatures. The book is a DMC special edition called 'Seaside/Bord de mer' which has more than 300 designs that are all related to the ocean/seaside...I think I found it at Spotlight several years ago. As you can see from the photos, Puss n Boots tried their hardest to be involved in the making of the project.

This morning (01/01/2011) it seemed like a good time to go through my stash of un-finished craft projects, triage them, and decide on a plan of action to complete as many as possible as well as preparing for a few new projects I have in mind. Two friends are expecting babies in the next few months, so I would like to make something homemade for each of them, plus I have 2 scarfs in progress for gifts, 2 other baby clothes in progress to keep for the future, and the crochet blanket that I am slowly working on in between everything else. I have now completed 17 granny squares for the crochet blanket, probably 100+ to go...I'm not sure whether to start stitching them together or to just leave them all as squares until I have enough to assemble an entire blanket.