Officially a teenager!

Our baby turned 13 yesterday and it seems like only yesterday that she was just a newborn baby. I can remember the day we bought her home from hospital. We were in awe of her in the way that most parents probably are with their first born. We would find ourselves not watching TV  but just staring at her instead, probably thinking 'isn't she beautiful but what do we now?' Ever since she was 2 years she has wanted to be a teenager and now it seems just like that she is one! We're hoping for a smooth ride!!??

Happy Birthday Amelia!! We are so proud of you and always will be!

A 'new to me' blog find!

I've recently found this great new blog that's all about using up your stash in innovative ways. I'm all for using up fabrics in my stash when I can as you can see in this quilt where I used up stash fabrics for the backing and leftover bias strips for the binding. Also my daughter Amelia's quilt was made from not only fabrics from my stash but also leftover batting and bias binding.

Amber from 'A little bit biased' has just done a guest post on there with some great stash busting tips. Another great post was done by Cathy of Cabbage Quilts who shared her ways of stash busting. So if you need ideas to use up your stash this is the blog for you. It was started up by Rae Ann Nilson of the blog Cutie Pinwheel and she just might be having a wee giveaway so you might want to scoot on over there and check it out.

After the rain............

Our garden's been getting a good drenching of rain in the last few days............

..........everything is looking fresh and clean.

Our weather has been unseasonably warm for autumn and I still have summer flowers blooming. I love the tiny blue centres of these white hydrangeas and on the same plant we have...............

....this bloom which has a hint of autumn pink ...

and this bloom that is full on autumn colours.

We have more rain to come according to the weather man which is great for the garden growth and also good for my sewing production. I have been working on a few smallish projects that I can hopefully show you soon. Not a lot of sewing time this week as I had a day out on a school trip to Auckland to see the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra. Not usually my music of choice but I've got to say I was thoroughly captivated.

Caitlin's baby quilt!

This is my entry in Amy's Bloggers Quilt festival for 2010. It was made for my 2nd daughter Caitlin. I designed the simple layout myself and chose the fabrics before she was born.  The fabrics have lots of animals and insects on them and Caitlin has grown up ( she is now 10 years) to love all animals and quite happily lets insects crawl all over her. It's a bright and happy quilt which suits Caitlin's personality as well.

The hearts are machine appliqued with a small blanket stitch then hand quilted with echo lines. I hand quilted uppercase letters down the sides of the border.

Along the top and bottom of the border are hand quilted numbers. The outer border is made up of leftover pieces from the nine patch blocks.

You can visit more Quilt Festival quilts over here. Thank you Amy for organising this festival and giving us the opportunity to showcase our special quilts.

We have a winner!

Thanks you to everyone who commented on my giveaway......I was overwhelmed with the response this time around!! Welcome to all my new followers, I hope you come back often so I can get to know you better! When I asked 'What was your favourite fabric line?' I didn't think about what a difficult question this is to answer!! I think the top ones were Nicey Jane, anything by Amy Butler, Anna Maria Horner and I could go on but a lot of you like to recycle and make the most of what you've got which is cool too.

Anyway the Random Generator came up with .........No.118 Jenny who's current favourite fabric lines are "Red Letter Day" and "Castle Peeps" by Lizzy House.

Congratulations Jenny! I will email you shortly.

Thanks to Sew Mama Sew for organising these giveaways!!

May Day giveaway time!!!!

I'm very happy to be once again participating in Sew Mama Sew's May Day Giveaway. I hope you like what I've put together for you! First up I have forty 5 inch charm squares of Balinese Batiks. If you want some inspiration on how to use batiks have a look here, and here and here.Then I have been madly hand sewing today to finish a needle case.

This is the reverse side which is made up of mostly scraps from the Wonderland by Momo fabric range.

And this is the inside.

To be included in my giveaway you can...

1. 
   
   Leave me a comment and tell me what your current favourite fabric collections are and also what your favourite online fabric shops are!!
2. Become a follower or if you already are just remind me :)
3. Please make sure I can contact you with your email address or via your blog if you have one.

• I am happy to ship internationally! 
• I will leave this giveaway open until May 20th and announce the winner by May 21st.
• The winner will be chosen by a random generator and the items shipped by May 24th.

Good luck to everyone and enjoy looking through all the other giveaways on offer!!

Bloggers Quilt Festival coming soon!

Hope you've all got a quilt ready to showcase in this great bloggers event organised by Amy. Can't wait to see the lovely quilt eye candy!!

Nicey Mail today!!

It's a bit of a dreary day here today but my day has considerably brightened up since the mail arrived.

Lovely Nicey Jane fabrics by Heather Bailey! I have coveted this line as soon as it was released, so when Lara offered it up for sale so she could free up her fabric buying budget, I didn't hesitate. Thanks so much Lara!

I love them all but this particular print is my favourite and in every colourway! I don't have a specific project in mind yet but I'm sure these fabrics will inspire me sooner rather than later.

As I said before its a bit showery here today but in between showers we are having lovely sunny patch's. We made the most of these patch's this morning by taking the girls down to the netball courts and having a mini game of netball with just the 4 of us. It was fun but also a good workout! Early this morning we were woken up with lightening and thunder then heavy rain that turned into hail. Our forecast for today was for more of the same and I was secretly looking forward to that because that sort of weather always makes me want to hibernate in my sewing room and get creative. I'm sure I'm not the only one that feels like this. My husband is the complete opposite, he gets cabin fever easily.

Hope everyone is having a lovely weekend! I'm off to get creative!!

A finish!!

As you can see it has the royal seal of approval! Finished it yesterday but we had heavy rain all day so was unable to take a decent photo. Today was fine and sunny so I have some lovely shots taken outside in my garden. I think her highness likes this quilt as she followed me around trying her best to get in each shot. She won in the end! Perhaps she just wanted to feature on my blog!

Here it is in all its technicolour beauty! I used most of the leftover strips from my string quilt but still have a few left for another quilt that I've designed myself this time.

I machine quilted along each seam line and tied the centre of each block with matching embroidery floss using 3 shades of the block colour and also tied where corners intersect.

And this is the back. I know, quite dull after the front but hey its made up of old fabrics from my stash that needed to be used up to make way for some fresh modern ones!  The green check binding was leftover from a previous quilt although I had to make more for this quilt. For now this quilt is going to hang out in our lounge to snuggle under on cold winter evenings. If you want to make a  'quilt as you go quilt' you can find the instructions over on Penny's blog. Thanks Penny for great instructions and hosting this quilt along.

It's here again!!

This coming Monday is giveaway day organised by Sew Mama Sew and I'm participating once again. These giveaways are so much fun so be sure to come back on Monday and sew what I'm giving away!

Fat quarter swap

I participated in Sew Mama Sew's fat quarter swap again this year. I love doing swaps, the anticipation of what you'll find in the mail, getting to know your partners and choosing fabrics for them and finding new blogs to read and add to my ever growing list of must reads.

My swap partners were:

1. Cat a fellow kiwi
2. Elizabeth from Portland, Oregon
3. Kriste from Texas
4. Dana from California (her blog is set to private)

As you can see in the above photo I received some beautiful fabrics, a handwritten poem, and a sheet of cute owl stickers. I wish I'd taken the time to photograph what I sent but Elizabeth has blogged about it beautifully here.Thanks ladies for being such great swap partners!!

Nearly there....

This is the backing side of my 'quilt-as-you-go' quilt all pinned and ready to quilt in the ditch of the seams but can you see my mistake? So... um.... yeah those pins should be on the right side of the quilt shouldn't they. Great! I thought I was being clever by laying down the backing first so I could make sure it was nice and flat then the quilted quilt top on top. Not a major mistake but before I started quilting I had to take out the pins and put them on the right side.

The actual quilting didn't take too long as it was just long straight rows down all the seams. I have the binding all ready to go so hope to have nice show and tell tomorrow.

A 3rd cushion for Mother's Day

Whipped up this third cushion for Mum yesterday afternoon. I'm very pleased with how these cushions have come out especially this one. Like the other two I machine quilted in the ditch and I think that was all that was needed. They are very traditional blocks and I remember them taking a bit time to piece together. It feels good to make something useful with them and know they are going to a good home. Some of the fabrics I've used in this particular one were from the very first quilt I made and which I gave to Mum anyway.

I'm going to wrap them up as well but just thought they looked good stacked from biggest to smallest and tied with some ribbon.

Wishing all the Mothers out there a happy day!!

Cushions for Mothers Day...

I made these pieced blocks a long time ago now. They were originally meant to go in this quilt but they didn't make the final cut so I put them aside and found them again a few weeks ago when I had a little tidy up in my sewing attic. I thought they would make perfect cushions for a Mother's day gift and go well in Mum's spare room. They measure 12" x 12" and 8" x 8" so they are just little decorative cushions.

I machine quilted them in the ditch, made some cushion inners and added button enclosures on the back. Not bad for an afternoon's work! I have one more to make which I will hopefully finish tomorrow. I'm adding this post to Amy's Sew'n'tell Friday. You can check out everyone else's finishes by clicking on the button over on the right side bar. Have a happy weekend!!

This guy is amazing!!!

Check out this really cool trick!!!

Working on the quilt backing....

Have finished my quilt as you go blocks and manged to get them all sewn together on Sunday. I knew I wouldn't have enough of one fabric or even two to make a quilt back so I chose about a dozen fabrics from my stash that all go together but I no longer like and needed to use them up. I was going to go for horizontal stripes but that was going to end up too 'random' looking ( to use my daughters current favourite phrase), so I cut up 14 1/2 " squares from the larger pieces to match up with the 14 1/2 " blocks on the quilt top. Then I cut smaller squares from the smaller fabric pieces that when pieced together 4x4 make up a 14 1/2 square as in the photo below. When I first cut these smaller squares I made a wee calculation error and made them too big which I guess is better than too small, so had to trim them all (128) to the correct size. I tried to get Amelia on to it yesterday but she found it all a little boring.

I know these fabrics aren't very inspiring but the colours go together nicely and it has made a nice dent in my fabric stash which I can now fill with prettier more modern looking fabrics.

Pretties in the mail!

A few weeks ago I won a giveaway on Jo's blog Bearpaw and yesterday I received this lovely package in the mail all the way from Edinburgh, Scotland. So exciting getting packages in the mail from so far away and knowing there's some pretty fabrics inside! She also included a pretty metal heart ornament that's sitting on top of the package in the above photo.

Aren't these fabrics beautiful! I love them! Thank you Jo! They are a slightly heavier weight than quilting cottons so I think would be perfect made up in a pretty cushion or one of these bags or maybe one of these.

Jo owns a lovely home wares shop that sells amongst other things these fabrics. You can check out her shop here.