A Birthday Quilt.

It's my niece Jasmine's birthday tomorrow.  She will be 5 and is having a fancy dress party with a bunch of her friends and family to celebrate.  Jasmine is also my God Daughter which means that I am supposed to be a good spiritual role model for her.  Her grandma, mum and I are all crafty so Jasmine will have no shortage of good creative influences in her life.  She is also an AWESOME artist in her own right.  Her pictures are amazing.  My brother is good at drawing too.  Must be in the genes, I reckon!

With her birthday coming up and my year of living creatively well and truly underway, I decided another birthday quilt was in order!  The floral fabric for this project was sourced from op shops, the wadding and backing were from Spotlight.  It is pieced together with a bunch of 6" squares arranged not very randomly (there is a pattern of sorts in there).

This shows the quilt pieced together and the border sewn on.  Very girly, a bit Liberty Print and the more I worked on it the more I liked the look of it.  Hope she likes it!

 In this pic below, I have quilted together the 3 layers of the quilt.  This part always causes me to fall in a heap as I fight with my lovely sewing machine for cooperation.  I ditched the walking foot I had put on due to the backing fabric bunching as I sewed.  I cried, unpicked, tried again, cried some more. argh!  Then I spoke with my buddy Lucianne and she put me back on track with words of advice and encouragement.  Plus I changed to a proper quilting needle and showed the fabric who was BOSS!

 So it came to today.  Tomorrow is Jasmine's birthday and well, I really had a deadline, don't you think?  I had already cut the binding so today I sewed the binding together, ironed the length of it into a bias binding, pinned into place and sewed it on.

 FINITO!  I have a gift to give Jasmine tomorrow!

 I had made the cushion a little while ago with the same fabrics.  It just has a calico back and a velcro fastening.

Happy Birthday Jasmine!

x Miss G

A Nomad in My Own Home

I love my home.  I love so many things about it - its location and closeness to things and people I like, the way it has a big room that we can all hang out in, the way I have my own (yet to be organised) study.  BUT for some reason I struggle to confine my activities to one place.  I make nests instead.

Lots of different nests that serve different purposes.  If I am in one of my nests I feel fine.
In any one week I could sleep in 3 different beds depending on how I feel or whether I am going to bed late and don't want to disturb my hubby.  I have been known to move my stuff from room to room in a basket depending on where I am in the house.  All my clothes are in the one place most of the time but this can change too.  Some things are downstairs and others upstairs.

These habits started early on before kids.  With a husband that is a light sleeper and with me being a deep & noisy sleeper, slumber compatibility is never going to happen.  No one can cope with a busy life with too little sleep so sleeping solo became accepted as normal.  Then kids came along and middle of the night feeds and the other nocturnal disturbances wreaked havoc on everyone's sleeping habits.

I am really trying to be more refined in my habits.  I am organising my crafting things and my personal things so that they have an easily accessible home within the home.  This is a slow process as getting everyone else organised is usually prioritised higher than getting myself organised.  I am chipping away at it, at least a little every day.

I have started keeping a notebook of ideals.  Not ideas. Ideals.  The ideal bedroom, studio, bathroom, kitchen, living room.  By ideal, I don't really mean it has to be a photogenic space with everything perfect.  I could not live like that for more than an hour.  It just has to function well and be nice to spend time in.  Where things are easy to find and put away.  That cupboard contents do not fall on my head when I open the door.

The day will come when things are Ideal.  In the meantime I will enjoy converting my mind and my space so that my nests are fewer and tidier but still cosy!

Happy Nesting

x Miss G

Making Stuff, Finding Stuff, Giving Stuff, Selling Stuff

Life is full of STUFF.  We are made of stuff, we surround ourselves with useful and not so useful stuff, we covet stuff, we give stuff away, we find stuff, we keep stuff, we buy & sell stuff.  "Stuff" is such a weird word.  We use it to describe what we are doing or wanting or making or collecting.  We use it when we can't find real words for the individual items in our life or when we want to be a bit mysterious and not give away the whole enchilada.  And we use it when we can't be stuffed.  Or when we have had too much food or activity and feel stuffed.

This is some of my recent STUFF

Stuff I've Made

Stuff I've Sold

Stuff I've Bought




















Stuff I LOVE




















Stuff I've Given

Hope you've enjoyed my recent stuff!

Stuff and Nonsense
x Miss G

I Crocheted Some Fruit Nests

I love fruit!  I love it so much that I thought I would use the fabric strips I picked up at Resource Rescue to make some nests for my fruit bowl.  I used a giant tunisian hook (about 11.5mm) and the bright orange and turquoise t-shirt fabric strips for these bowls.  My first attempt left the nest with a friend about 2 hours after being finished.  Then I made another orange one and an orange and blue one.  Forgive my crochet language below - please get in touch if you require an interpreter… I am still very much learning this lingo!

The technique was pretty simple.  Start with a slip knot and crochet a chain of about 7, connect the chain into a ring and treble crochet into the ring about 7 or 8 times.  Next round is increasing so treble crochet twice into each gap of the first round, connect round and do the same for the third round.  Then to make the walls of the bowl, double crochet once into the gaps of the 3rd round and continue doing this until the wall is the desired height for your desirable fruit.   I finish with a single round of double crochet and then tie in and sew in all ends.

It is very deceptive, but you do need quite a lot of the fabric strips so if you are cutting up a t-shirt or heading to Resource Rescue make sure you get yourself a goodly pile - you can never have too much of this stuff.  Any small lengths can be used for staking plants in your garden!

Happy Nesting!

x Miss G

Hottie Challenge!

I love hot water bottles!  I had a red one when I was a kid - it had no cover on it.  And now we seem to use wheat bags more and more.  Wheat bags are great but there is a nostalgia embedded in hot water bottles - the way they feel, smell, stay warm, get cold, leak etc…. takes me back to the good ol' days!

Last night, the opening of the Hottie Challenge exhibition at Open Drawer Gallery in Hartwell, saw crafters and their families mingle amongst magnificent hand made hottie cover treasures.  So many to look at, so hard to pick a favourite, harder still to choose which one to buy!  Scroll down to the end to see which one I bought!  The one I made is second from the left in the first pic and in the third pic on its own.

Get along to the exhibition and support the Margaret Pratt Foundation, pick your favourite  hottie by a coin vote, and even buy one if there are any left without red dots!  All proceeds go to the Margaret Pratt Foundation and all Hotties are for sale at $50.  Thanks to Cam from CurlyPops for mobilising all her crafty friends to create Hotties for the exhibition and fundraising!  It was great to meet her in real life!  Check out Cam's blog for pics of more gorgeous Hotties!  Using our craft for good made us all feel AMAZING!!  And also Liz from Betty Jo Designs has more Hotties on her blog -  Find Make Do !

Yes, I bought this gorgeous Robot Hottie! He caught my eye and kept me going back for more!

Hope you're feeling HOT!
xo Miss G