My First Crochet Blanket finished!! :-)

My first crochet blanket finished (25 squares). A lot of love and time has gone into making this, and lots of remembering my Nanna Garland, who used to knit and crochet a lot of special things for me and her other grandchildren. I was initially making these crochet squares in order to make a bed blanket for myself. Then a friend at work who is a member of the Zonta women's club told me that her club was knitting baby blankets to give to refugee/migrant women in Adelaide with young babies.

I decided to make the crochet squares into a baby blanket for the Zonta club to give to a migrant or refugee woman in Adelaide. I know my blanket is far from perfect, but it is the first time I have crocheted anything, and I put a lot of love into it, it's actually quite hard to part with, and I really hope it makes the woman who receives it and her baby happy :-) and makes them feel more welcome in Australia.

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.