In progress...

I don't have any finished projects to describe since the last post. However I have started making a baby cardigan using some of the beautiful merino-silk yarn I bought at Purl Soho while in New York recently. It is the most lovely yarn to work with, so soft and silky and easy to knit. I am making a 'garter stitch cardigan' using a pattern from 'Simple knits for cherished babies' by Erika Knight. The yarn is called Olivewood, by Manos del Uruguay, hand-dyed...a mix of blue and brown shades.
Also, in other news...our passionfruit vines have just produced their first fruit...I counted 10 this week. Very exciting. I had planted two varieties and they are intertwined so I'm not sure if the fruits are all from the one variety or a mix of the two. One is the typical black passionfruit, the other was a Panama gold, so now I just have to wait for them to ripen and find out which variety the fruit belong to :-)

Buttons

After a visit to "the button bar" in Adelaide Arcade this morning, I have now completed the little pale blue and brown speckled baby vest. "The button bar" is a small shop crammed full of almost every kind of button you can possibly imagine, plus other knitting and sewing items. It was very hard to make a decision when there were so many to choose from, but in the end I chose some little wooden flower-shaped buttons.

In the last week I have been working slowly on hand-stitching the binding onto my quilt, but I have only completed about a quarter of it so far, with some "help" from Puss as usual. I think she thinks I'm making the quilt for her, as soon as she spots it she runs over and lies down on it, even if it's on my craft table (a kitten-free zone when I'm not supervising them due to the presence of pins and threads etc).

Easter crafts

It was lovely having a 4-day weekend over Easter. We spent time with J's family, saw "The best exotic marigold hotel" at the movies (very funny), and there was even some time for craft! Starting off on Good Friday in an "Easter" mood, I baked some gingerbread biscuits and painted them with melted chocolate. I used some cute cookie cutters bought in New York last month to cut them out as little Easter bunnies and Easter birds.

In the last week I finished knitting a baby vest/dress using the 'plain vest' pattern bought from the Pickles website (www.pickles.no) using pale blue wool with brown speckles. This was a project I started in September last year, and now I just need to find the right buttons to finish off the outfit.

Over the long weekend I had some time to do some more work on my quilt...I used iron-on pellum for the padding layer, then cut out the backing fabric and sewed that onto the reverse side of the quilt. Then I cut out strips of my contrasting binding fabric 2 and a half inches wide, and ironed them to turn them into something like bias binding tape. I stitched the binding onto the front edge of the quilt, and have pinned it on the reverse side. Apparently attaching the binding onto the reverse side of the quilt requires hand-stitching rather than speedy machine stitching, so I thought that was a good place to take a break..Hopefully will have time to work on doing a small amount of hand stitching each night over the next week or so and get it finished. I had been doing a little bit of crocheting in the evenings lately (up to granny square # 21 for my crochet blanket now), but I'll give that a break for a bit and focus on finishing the quilt. Once it's complete I'll post some pictures of my first quilt project :-)

I can now also include photos of a purple scarf I finished last month, as it was a present for J's mum's birthday, and I didn't want to put photos up before I'd actually given it to her.