A lovely mail day!

I recieved my Easter/May swap parcel this morning! It was a lovely surprise waiting for me when I got home from a bike ride. Inside was some gorgeous Heather Ross Mendocino fabrics (7 pieces) and a cute birdie fabric, matching thread, a needlecase - perfect for my handquilting needles, a note book, a mini calender and last but definitely not least a yummy selection of chocolates.

Thank you to my secret swap partner Laurie (ladmquilter). Everything is just perfect!!

8 down 12 to go...

Nearly halfway there with my 'quilt as you go' blocks. I need to do 2 more like these ones with the pale centres then the other 10 blocks will be opposite with dark centres. I'm really liking these blocks now that I have made a few more. They do take a bit longer, actually quite a bit longer than a normal block but I won't have a huge quilt to quilt at the end. I'm just hoping I have enough scraps left to complete it otherwise I will just have to cut into fabrics in my stash which is probably a good thing because then I'll have room for some 'new' fabrics. You can check out all the other 'quilt as you go quilts' over here.

Random snapshots around our home....

Addicted to this........

Getting back into this.....

Still working on these.....

Inspired by autumn flowers in our garden.........

Flowers from my red onion plants at 3 different stages of bloom.

 

Looking forward to lots of sewing in the next 3 days as the girls have gone to Grandma and Grandad's to be spoilt rotten. Happy Birthday Grandma!!

Today's craft activity....

Book marked this site a while back thinking that we  might try some the cool activities on it some day. All the activities are free to download and are fairly quick and simple. Quite a few of the activities would be suitable for younger children too.Today we made 'spinners' which are made of paper with a different part of a picture on each side with string in the middle. Hard to explain but when you spin the string the two bits of pictures mix together to make one cool picture.  Hopefully my photos will demonstrate better than I can explain.

When you spin this one you get the face on the cat.

Here are the 6 spinners we made and ...

....the other 'half' of the pictures.

I have managed to get a little sewing done today. These blocks are for Penny's "Quilt as you go quilt-along". I started off with the random placed coloured one on the right but really wasn't liking it so decided to go with the one colour per block which works better for me.

It's the holidays....

 

Yes the girls are off school for 2 weeks so to keep them entertained I will try and find some sort of craft activity each day. Today we made these bookmarks based on the latest Alice in Wonderland movie just released. We downloaded them from Disney's website where they have various crafts and even recipes based around the film. Amelia and I are keen to make the 'Alice shadowbox' next which  little bit more involved than the bookmarks. For the bookmarks we just printed them on normal printer paper and glued them on to cardstock then added different coloured ribbon to the tops of each one. Bookmarks always come in handy in our house!

If you have any great craft ideas so share I would love to hear from you.

Wishing everyone a Happy Easter!!!!!

Whipped up these fabric Easter eggs yesterday afternoon. I found the tutorial on Retromama's blog last year and have been wanting to make them ever since.They were really quick and easy plus you can just use up some fabric scraps. I've matched some of my stripes from the cushion in my last post with other scraps including some vintage fabrics given to me by my Aunt who was a bit of a seamstress in her day. My favourite fabric and very appropriate for Easter is the yellow one in the front with the chickens on it.

Hope everyone is having a great Easter weekend where ever you are!!

A Friday finish!

Another cushion to lounge around on. Have been working on this all afternoon and managed to get it finished just before dinner (thankfully my DH made dinner tonight). After I machine quilted it I wasn't so sure whether I still liked it as much but now it has a nice plump pillowform inside I'm warming to it again. I did really enjoy working with the stripes for a change and just playing with the layout. I think in hindsight I would have done a simpler quilting pattern. The idea for this cushion is from Kaffe Fassetts book "Passionate patchwork" which is full of beautiful quilt patterns and just great inspiration.

The reverse side.

 It measures 24" x 24" so its big enough for a throw cushion in our lounge. I really want to keep it nice and vibrant which will be a challenge in our lounge as we have floor to ceiling windows on one wall and the sun streams in all morning (nice on winter mornings though).

I'm adding this to Amylouwho's Sew'n'tell Friday this week. Be sure to go on over and check out everyone's great finishes this week.