A Finish or Two

Naturally chocolate featured in the plan for this past weekend. Mr. P and I spent Thursday night and Friday with Miss P and Little P ...an Easter egg hunt yielded a bounty of goodness and one very excited little boy. 

We had breakfast with Mr. P's family on Friday and in the presence of very good company I finished Superheroes 1. Finally. 

Excuse the cruddy photo. Its so overcast here today and I couldn't take this outside because the rubbish men are lurking round emptying bins and I'm still in my pyjamas. Without a bra. Very unattractive.

And then Friday afternoon we headed up to the river and spent some time with my parents for the rest of the long weekend. There was some retail therapy and plenty of sewing.

I made three needle books 

Briar Rose got finished on Saturday and I'm doing the happy dance because I really like it a lot.  

and on Sunday I indulged in some more retail therapy. It seems I'm on a roll with buying variegated threads but these were a bargain I couldn't resist at 20% off.  

I started the baby quilt (the one I was supposed to have finished in March- nothing like leaving it till the last day of the month to make a start !). All the fabrics are cut for the front and back and the top is almost done.  

Speaking of March goals, I may have finished two quilts in March (again - go me- I was starting to think I may not finish ANY quilts in 2013) but I kinda bombed on my actual goals for March. Hopeless! The chair is still mocking me, and I didn't get the top for Superheroes 2 finished although I did get the back done and surely that counts for something. I finished only 2/10 recycled shirt quilt blocks and the baby quilt didn't get finished either. Frankly making lists sucks, or I suck at finishing the things on my lists ! 

April Goals (I don't know why I bother ...seriously!) 

1)Finish the baby quilt , top, back, quilting and binding.

2)Final 8 blocks of the recycled shirt quilt 

3)Put the top together for the recycled shirt quilt

4)Finish superheroes 2 (top, quilting and binding )

I'm all about ignoring the chair for another month. It's not going to happen in April so I'm not going to pretend it is. Re-upholstering that chair terrifies me. 

I hope everyone had a peaceful and happy Easter and isn't suffering from chocolate overload. 

Cramming

I had a rather drastic haircut on Saturday as well as a new colour (I was starting to look like Cruella de Vil or a skunk or both)  I decided to go all trendy at the suggestion of my 21 year old hairdresser and had an asymmetrical bob done which means one side of my hair is noticeably longer than the other.  I'm not sure yet whether I look hip and trendy or whether it looks like I did my own haircut with a knife and fork. 

As usual the weekend seemed to be over far too quickly. Often Sunday night appears and I think "What? almost Monday already?" like it's somehow a shock that Monday follows Sunday and that I didn't get half the things done that I'd planned. But this weekend was packed full of sewing and a couple of almost finishes in the quilting department. That's what I call a good weekend!

I put on my big girl panties and finished the quilting on Superheroes 1. I still don't think it's one of my best quilting efforts in terms of execution but the silver lining here is that it helped me decide what not to do for Superheroes 2. I'm pretty sure this is what a real spider web would look like if the spider had just dropped acid. 

I was doing the happy dance at the idea of being that close to a finish though and maybe if I wash the crap out of it all those cruddy bits I don't like will dissolve in the wash?

I'm half way through making the back for Superheroes 2 and having learned my lesson I'm keeping it simple. 

Little Miss Sunshine gave me the heads up a while back about a different method to basting a quilt and I gave that a crack this weekend. Instead of basting all three layers at once, I spray basted the front to the batting first and then spray basted the top two layers to the backing. Mind you I still pinned it to within an inch of it's life. Just to be sure.  I got great results using this method with my backing looking almost perfect when I pulled it off my basting table.

Some simple in the ditch stitching in the main body of the quilt 

And I did such an awesome job of matching the backing thread that you cant see I  did a single argyle pattern in the borders. I was originally going to use red top thread on the front in the borders but chickened out at the last minute. I'm kicking myself now because that would have looked fabulous. And I'm seriously happy with the quilting on this one. Now I just have to make the binding for both of these and spend some time hand sewing. I can sniff an imminent finish or two! It's about bloody time . I think I'm the only person in the entire quilting fraternity that hasn't had a 2013 finish!

And finally I've been the lucky recipient of some beautiful goodies the last week or so that I want to show off and say a big thank you for. 

At our sewing day last weekend Quiltygal gifted me these gorgeous babushka fabrics. Sewing friends are the best friends ever! Thank you Claire. 

And recently I've won not one , but two blog giveaways!

First up from the beautiful Elizabeth at Such a Sew and Sew I got this parcel of yumminess. I'll be sticking babushka stickers on everything I own from here on in. Too cute ! 

And from Terri at QuiltNcards  I got these awesome fabrics, some licorice (I've heard about Good and Plenty but never had any)  and since Terri is the official Queen of Paper Piecing she sent me this lovely example of her work. I was truly spoiled. 

Thank you so much ladies. Your generosity has brightened my days. 

It's off to work for me , although I'd much rather be tackling those binding jobs! 

I'm Following the Leader

I've been watching a lot of you posting about cleaning through your sewing spaces lately. Tidying and re-configuring seems to have swept blogland like some kind of sewing room plague. Kudos to you all.  I did that last year and I'm pretty happy with the way everything is laid out. It's functional, everything is easy to get to and I know where everything is. That is...I thought it was functional, and easy to move around in and that I knew where everything was until I went looking for something on Saturday.

Not being able to find the repro triangles I cut on Thursday or the yellow sashing for Little P's Superhero blocks drove me over the edge. (I eventually found the yellow sashing stuffed in the scissor drawer) I also had no idea where the hexie flowers that had the paper so painstakingly removed were or where any of the blocks I'd completed for the recycled shirt quilt had got to. Let's not even talk about opening the wardrobe because that presented the very real risk of being crushed to death by falling debris. 

I showed Little Miss Sunshine the mess via Facetime and even she was shocked, gleefully informing me that my mess was far worse than hers. When you get to that point the only thing to do is catch a big old dose of the same illness everyone else has and get infected by the tidying bug.

So on Saturday night Mr. P whacked Pearl Harbor into the DVD and I set about re-organising all my fabric back into their respective boxes while watching Kate Beckinsale wait for missing Ben Affleck for three whole months before she decided his best mate was a better deal because at least he was alive before Josh Hartnett gets heroically killed and she goes back to Ben Affleck even though Josh Hartnett is her baby daddy. I figure everyone has seen Pearl Harbor by now so I hope that didn't spoil the movie for anyone who was possibly planning to catch up on movies they've never seen in the imminent future. If so, that's one you won't have to watch now. 

Cleaning up for some reason always seems to result in a whole load more mess being made. In fact I'm still cleaning up in there, but I'm happy to report that most of my fabric has been re-folded and stored back in it's respective hidey holes. And that as the result of all this activity all of my current projects have their own boxes instead of being left to live where I last got sick of them until I decide I want to work on them again. Hopefully  that will help me avoid another "I can't find a f****** thing " scenario like I had on Saturday. 

I've made a rule that I can only open and work on one project box at a time but we all know that wont last, and that within a fortnight my sewing room will probably look just as dire as it did before I did this monumental clean up. And I still haven't worked up the guts to open the wardrobe door yet.

In amongst all of this I managed to do bits and pieces on some of my projects as I was going along because it's apparently impossible for me to pick one task and not get distracted. 

All the triangles are cut out for my new quilting project. The big question is whether I can resist sewing them together until I've finished the quilting on Superheroes 1....

I cut up the rest of the old shirts I had laying around (literally-on the floor) ready to make the final hexie blocks and the backing for the quilt. Look ! Don't they look organised in their little box? 

I finished all the yellow blocks for Little P's superheroes quilt top and started the red ones. Yes I'm aware I haven't pressed them yet just as I'm well aware of the vow I made that I was going to finish the entire quilt top this month. There are still two days left - so I might do it , although that's looking very unlikely. 

And I fixed a 3 inch popped seam in the crutch of Mr. P's favourite shorts. He's been wearing them like that for weeks until I finally refused to be seen in public with him wearing them like that. You could see his undies when his shirt rode up. Try not to think about what it would look like if he didn't wear undies because that visual will give you nightmares. And he's actually incredibly lucky I didn't sew them directly to his crutch since he came to me as he was putting them on and asked if I could do them right that minute-right that minute being 10 minutes before we were due out the door for dinner at Sister Of Pyjamas house.  No pictures - be thankful I spared you that!