Mojo A Go Go

Just when I thought my mojo was lost forever and I was lamenting the fact I'd finished two whole quilts this year I've managed to knock the ball out of the park and finish two more this month. It's about bloody time I got an injection of creativity that actually led to finishing stuff ! 

I started this quilt on a whim after seeing another version of it when I dropped some backing for another quilt off to my awesome magic quilting fairy recently.  The idea looked so simple and ingenious (and fast to do - I like fast because there's no opportunity to get bored with a project and shove it in a corner ) so I started it the very next day and 15 days later it was done. It was a dream project, as long as you don't count the silliness where I thought I could hand quilt this as a starter project. Pfttttttt...forget that. I'm going to start with hand quilting a pot holder. 

I suffered for my art ...getting my socks wet to take this picture. 

And I came in and informed Mr. P we simply need to move because  there is nowhere picturesque to take a picture in our yard.

Nanci sent me a layer cake of this fabric 18 months or so ago and it's been waiting for the perfect idea to come along.  I love this fabric and cuddling up to this quilt in winter is going to be a reminder that Spring will arrive again (eventually). The heating is well and truly turned on here these days and I even broke out of pair of socks last night. Seriously -winter is just bullshit. 

The mojo was slightly interrupted by a visit from Little P this weekend. Since we hadn't seen him for almost a month we had plenty of catching up to do. I was mistaken for his mother twice which really made me feel awesome because I've been feeling kinda old and frumpy lately. I either look really young or I was acting so immaturely in public that people couldn't believe I was a grandparent. Whatever. Bear with me for a sec while I break out my bragging pictures from the visit. I know every grandparent thinks their grandchildren are the smartest most adorable children ever but Little P really is. Everything is better when he's around. 

I'm linking this post  up to Elizabeth's monthly finish linky party because I keep promising her I will when I finish something and then I totally forget to do it!

P.S. The quilt finishes may slow considerably over the next couple of weeks since I am now pinning trillions of pictures of bags on Pinterest. One of my nephews asked me to make his girlfriend a bag months ago and I'm just now thinking about it. 

P.P.S Just wrote girlfriend as "girlfiend"..and she isn't a fiend at all ...G is adorable. My sister is blessed by having two gorgeous prospective daughter in laws that she gets along so well with. Both her boys picked good!

Distractions

At some point during  a period of intense crafty inspiration you get so many great ideas in your head that your brain simply cant keep them all in there and so you have to try and translate them into reality. Its like a law of the universe or something.  I mention this only because I seem to be working happily on so many projects at the moment - somethings gotta give - but I 'll take it where I can get it. 

I was  inspired to start hand quilting a quilt. I got 12 inches in before I realised three stitches to an inch is pretty crap  and I’ve since  managed to convince myself that only an insane woman starts her first hand quilting project with a full sized quilt.  I’m thinking a mini quilt is a good place to start my hand quilting experience. Naturally I'll have to make the mini first so I've moved on to other things. Goodness knows I have plenty of unfinished projects laying round begging to be finished things.   

I finished quilting the Gelati quilt  (thanks for the name Ms. Nerida ) by machine  this past weekend.  I think I made the right call because I’m really happy with how it’s turning  out. This is going to be a lay around, drag on the floor , drop whatever you happen to be munching on at the time quilt for my house so it doesn't have to be fancy. I'm half way through finishing the binding so I'll show you the whole thing in all it's glory soon. 

Last week I allowed myself to be distracted by Pinterest and all the pretty scarves there. There I was inspired to knit an infinity scarf because I was formerly inspired to make a gingham knitted blanket  that I haven’t got  right yarn for (and that is seriously going to take forever to make ) and I just wanted to knit something. Then I got distracted by the idea of buying a scarf on Ebay instead. My moral conscience kicked in when I realised that 4 dollar scarf I wanted to buy (with free shipping no less ) was  made by someone in China working for 12 cents an hour .  Eventually I went back and cast on my stitches for the infinity scarf and have managed to get this far. Assuming my interest doesn’t wane too much I could conceivably be wearing this before the end of winter.

Tazz and AusRose made faces like this at a recent sewing day when I mentioned I was going to machine appliqué my hexie flowers onto their backing blocks. 

I took those looks to mean "Crap-est idea you've ever had " and so I have succumbed to peer pressure and wiser heads than my own and I’m hand appliquéing them onto the blocks. I've done 12 this past week and I'm not finding it as mind numbingly boring as I thought it would be. In fact -it's quite relaxing.  

"Beep Beep" is finished, washed and crinkled so it looks well loved and is off to Master Jack this week. This kid lives in the tropics so I imagining this will be decorative rather than strictly functional.  

Onwards and upwards...dont want to lose that mojo!

It doesnt take a lot to get me excited (and to blog about it )

For 12 long years I've struggled every single time I've opened our back sliding door. The muscles in my left arm have become disproportionately over developed because of the force needed to open it. Yes- I have one superhero arm and one bingo wing.  The door rollers were dodgy before I moved in here and because some bright spark told us that we would have to replace the entire window, door and frame we've just put up with it. My father in law decided he could do something about that when he was here on Sunday and by last night for the first time ever I have a door that you can open with one finger. I can't tell you how happy that makes me . I've opened that door so many times over the last day that Mr. P keeps warning me I'm going to wear it out. The little things people - its the little things. Be thankful I don't know how to upload video because if I did you would all be treated to 10 minutes of YouTube video of a door opening and closing (and I'd fully expect you to get as excited about it as I am) 

I bit the bullet on Monday and bought some bulbs for the garden. I've never grown flowers from bulbs in my life. If I manage to keep them from curling up their toes, come Spring maybe my garden will look something like this. 20 bulbs should yield a vista like this - right? 

Image credit because mine haven't been put in the ground yet

 And I love the look of this clump of Hyacinths so I'm going to have a go at keeping some of them alive too. I may have just wasted $37.95 that I could have spent on fabric but I think it will make for an interesting experiment. 

Image credit 

And lastly there has been some plotting and planning going on here the last few weeks that I've refused to get excited about until I knew whether it was likely to come to pass. The crane and transport guys came yesterday and advised they could get this into our yard by removing part of our back fence  and using a crane to drop it down and it wont cost us a trillion dollars. Now I'm keeping everything crossed that council will play nice and approve it. ( If you could all keep your fingers and toes crossed for us that would be great -thanks) 

I figure this would be the perfect place to store my fabric and other sewing related items as well as everything we have in our current (very small) shed. Now do you see why I'm so excited?

Wrap Up

Little Miss Sunshine came to stay late last week and I spent most of her visit trying to convince her that Adelaide isn't the cultural and social backwater of Australia. The other states often poke fun at us down South because we're smaller than they are and a little more sedate and in turn we poke fun at Tasmania for the same reason. I guess bullying is prevalent everywhere. Anyway I wanted to show her that there are a ton of fun things to do in Adelaide besides looking at our architecturally brilliant churches and doing pub crawls.

The first must do stop was on the way home from the airport where we laid in some essential supplies for the week. 

Cosmopolitan cocktails under the back veranda eased us into Thursday night. 

image credit from here - I was too busy guzzling cocktails to take any pictures 

By 9.00pm we were both ready for bed mainly due to the fact I was mixing doubles. Don't judge me. I was just following the directions on the bottle. At the point that I couldn't read those directions anymore Mr. P took over as bartender. And cooked dinner because I wasn't in a fit state to do that either.   

Naturally Friday morning was a slow start while our livers processed the efforts of the night before. I'm proud to say I didn't have a post drinking chuck and we were out of the house and heading for the Barossa by 11.30am. 

We visited Maggie Beer's Farm Shop, had lunch at a local pub, hit a couple of quilt shops, and generally meandered round taking in all the sights of the Barossa. 

When you venture out to the country its essential to bring home a country kind of keepsake. Meet Clarence my heavy metal chicken. Which makes him a rooster  now that I come to think of it. 

Friday night included gin and tonics but we were wary of a repeat of the great alcohol incident of Thursday so we kept it to a sensible level of consumption. 

Saturday saw us hit

Best quilt store ever. 

See what I mean? You want to go there now and spend all your money don't you? It's like evil aliens take over my brain every time I walk in that shop. I came away a lot lighter in the pocket but also completely inspired to make a bajillion new things. 

We also made stops at Eastern Silk and Bowerbird Bazaar and my favourite lunch spot in town, The Brown Dog. 

In fact, the week was pretty much all about eating. Sunday night we went to a Vietnamese restaurant to sample some Dinky Di (that means authentic )cuisine. Kirsten I'm posting all these food pictures for you. 

We also hit Glenelg beach another day and meandered up and down Jetty Road. I may have bought some new clothes and another handbag. Yes I'm as weak as crap. 

And since Patchwork by Sea was very close we also went there to spend more money on projects that may never get finished. 

On Marg's last day we classed it up by having High Tea at Newman's Nursery. 

(And going to Haigh's again)

So the summary?  Alcohol was drunk, nobody got arrested, we both weigh 10 kilos heavier from all the food we consumed and my sewing room is now officially full because I went on a mad buying spree this week. 

I'll leave you with a picture of the most perfect gift ever, supplied by my ever thoughtful friend who knows all my weaknesses ...

How freaking cute is that? 

Almost makes me regret getting her hooked on Hay Day.....

Ugh....

Yes – I'm aware it’s May 7^th...and that I’m schmoozing in here late as usual to give a full account of my achievements for April.  I have an excuse . Its hard to write a blog post about nothing.

If Unachievements was an actual word I’d be using that instead since I completely ran out of  steam in about Week 1.  I didn’t touch my machine for the last three weeks of the month except to repair a ruffle on one of my favourite shirts.  We all know garment repairs don’t count as REAL sewing even if they do prevent us from having to go to work naked.

I only managed to get the final 8 blocks done for the recycled shirt quilt last month.  Yep folks that’s it. Huge effort for the month.  ABSOLUTELY  huge. Then I laid it all out to motivate myself to sew it together but then I put it in a plastic box and forgot about it again.

I did completely clean out my sewing room though. I think that counts for a lot. At least I can find all my  WIP’s now- even if I am ignoring them.

That poor baby quilt is still lurking in a sadly  unfinished  state (and it was meant to be on a plane with Sister of Pyjamas four days ago winging its way to the intended recipient) Baby Jack arrived in the world this afternoon and it would be so nice to have this quilt finished before he starts primary school.  I'm about quarter of the way through the binding so maybe I could pull out at least one finish this month?

I continue to be inspired by projects that I really cant resist starting. I tell myself that they’ll be quick to knock up but the truth is I'm all about increasing my WIP pile to epic proportions. But for better or worse in the last week I’ve started an Irish chain quilt in red and white. Mainly so I can use up all the red fabrics I collected while not finishing the Farmers Wife Quilt I started last year.

And today I started this...

And I’m planning to suck it up and hand quilt this one so the ultimate finish may be months (or even years) away,especially since I’ve never hand quilted anything in my life.

Making monthly goals is the stupidest idea I ever had.  I seem to get much more done when I just bumble along smelling the roses along the way, meandering on to something new when I feel like it. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.  

Cruel and Unusual Punishment

You may recall two weeks ago Claire threw down the gauntlet and challenged me to cook dinner from scratch for 7 straight nights.There seems to be a wild rumour out there in the ether that I'll do just about anything to avoid cooking dinner, aided no doubt by my own admission in the disclaimer section of my profile. 

Its not that I don’t like to cook – I’m as Nigella as the rest of you. Its just that by the time I get home from work most nights all my creativity has been sucked away by the events of the day and so  Mr. P gets sent out to forage for food at the local Maccas or Chinese takeaway. The hunter gatherer thing has been built into men’s DNA since time began so in reality I’m doing him a favour by providing ways for him to use his XY chromosomes. 

I like a good challenge and I was interested to see if I could pull off 7 nights of cooking in a row mainly so I could email Claire and say "in your face" ( in the nicest possible way of course ).

And while things started well and I did spend some of the week cooking stuff I hadn't done before I think Claire is going to be emailing me and saying "in your face" instead of the other way around.

From Left to Right - Leek and Feta Pie, Monster Sandwiches (which was Monday lunch actually but how cute are they?), fruit stack snack (and little P looking earnest - he was telling Grandpa how bloody awesome dessert was ) 

Chorizo casserole, salad , and ginger ice cream sandwiches with hot fudge sauce 

Steak and salad , home made gnocchi rolled with my own hands, and the finished product ...gnocchi with bacon, garlic cream sauce -definitely making that again 

It wasn't all beer and skittles and cooking all week though. I lost it a few nights and reverted to my old modus operandi to get my belly full.

Yes, I actually had chips for dinner one night , yes I actually sent Mr. P to the local chinese for salt and pepper scallops another night and yes Mr. P took me out for Greek food on Saturday night so I didn't have to cook. 

Ridiculous challenge. Nobody cooks every night. It's just not natural.

Well played Claire - well played. 

Favourite Things Friday

Welcome to Friday people!

I'm not sure exactly where the last week has gone because it feels like about two days ago that I was sitting down to write my last Favourite Things Friday post. I've spent much of the week when I haven't been at work going through my wardrobe trying to find clothes that have some sort of wool or warm fibre content because all of a sudden ..baby it's cold outside. I think we may have cut out the middle man and skipped autumn and gone straight to winter. 

I'm off to do some clothes shopping tomorrow because I've fallen out of love with some of the winter clothes I've dragged out of various hiding places . I've been ruthless in the chucking out process and while there is no imminent danger than I'm going to be wandering round naked, ( I'm hearing sighs of relief from the peanut gallery) if I'm going to be forced to endure wearing multiple layers of clothes for the next 6 months I fully intend to do it with some semblance of style.  I'm thinking something like this might be in order. Tres chic !

Image credit 

Enough about fashion and on to my favourite thing for this Friday.   

When I started FTF in September 2010  I had no idea that I'd still be doing it all this time later.  My thought was that it might make a great linky party for a year but it just seemed to take on a life of it's own and so it's continued. The whole point of the series has been to encourage people to take a moment out of their busy lives and think about something that has been a personal bright spot.  For me that's entailed really thinking each week about something that has made me laugh or smile or given me joy, which has been such a great way to finish off each week.  

I really enjoy seeing other people's favourite things each week. Some of the posts are about creative pursuits , some are about favourite people, places, or things, some people write about experiences they've had and some people share new acquisitions. Looking back, the sheer variety of posts has been staggering and so much fun to see. 

Blogging is all about keeping it fresh and knowing when to fold. And like a three day old home baked cookie I think FTF has gone a bit stale. I've thought about this a lot over the last few months and made the decision this week that its best to formally announce that today's Favourite Things will be the last linky party for the series. Every dog has it's day and it's time for FTF to slide gracefully into retirement. 

So my favourite thing for this week has been FTF itself, and the way people have embraced the idea, linked up week after week , commented on the posts and thrown themselves whole heartedly into the concept. Thank you for linking up and taking the time to share your favourite things.  I have really enjoyed hosting and seeing the things that other people love. I've ruthlessly stolen your ideas, gasped at your creativity and coveted some of your favourite things.  It's truly been a blast.  

Favourite Things Friday

It's still Friday somewhere in the world... and since I'm late to my own party this week  I'm making this short and sweet!

Work has been one big busy-fest since I went back in February. I've felt like I've been chasing my tail and haven't caught it once. But its school holidays here at the moment, which means that things are a mildly less crazy and my favourite thing this week is the luxury of catch up time. Time to do all those things that have been lurking and weighing heavily on my conscience.

I started the day yesterday with a pile that looked like this

and by the end of the day I was  feeling very chuffed that I'd managed to get it down to this.

Is there anything more satisfying than working your way through a load of stuff and getting it off your list? Never mind that I have about 6 piles like that to get through before school holidays end. I can do it ! 

Sometimes it's the simple things that make our hearts sing. Feel free to link up and let me know what made your week too. 

P.S. I've been really slack about responding to emails lately. Thank you to each and every one of you for your lovely comments. My email inbox has reached the point where I have so many I'm just going to cut my losses and start again. Back to normal this week I promise!

The Challenge

Yesterday was my monthly "Not the Farmers Wife " sewing group. I can't tell you how much I enjoy getting together with these girls. It's always a blast. Even if they do come up with cruel and unusual punishments (keep reading!) 

I was late, which is my usual MO on sewing days. I had a valid excuse because I was returning a lost dog to its owner before it got squished by traffic on the main road. Why is it a law of the universe that when you need your mobile phone its always dead? And by the way has anyone tried to find a public phone box lately? It took me ages. Finally the dog was restored to his rightful family and good deed done for the day I arrived at my destination.

We were missing a few groupies yesterday. For those of you that weren't present rest assured that I managed to talk enough in your absence so that you were barely missed (read: I totally monopolised the conversation for at least two hours bitching and whining) Thank you again Not the Farmers Wifers for listening to my tale of woe. 

Then we solved the mysteries of the universe and moved on to the conundrum of exactly how often I actually cook dinner.  The girls pretended to be horrified at my admission but I know they secretly wish they could work out how to eat takeaway or have someone else cook dinner 4 nights out of 7. In the end I was challenged to cook for 7 nights straight from scratch. I'm pretty sure that was Claire's idea because she looks like someone who enjoys a little kitchen torture.  I think Val was egging her on too. Challenge accepted. 

Denise(no blog) put on this spread of awesomeness for sweets. NTFW days may end up like kids birthday parties where we all subsequently try to out do each other in the dessert stakes. 

This is what I worked on yesterday. I had hoped to take the Beep Beep baby quilt to do the binding but alas the quilting isn't finished yet because Little P came for a visit on Thursday night and on Friday I was busy at the playground and duck feeding instead of sewing. 

My original idea was to make a full sized quilt out of red yoyos based on this picture which makes my heart sing every time I see it. Isn't it GORGEOUS?

Stupidly I've kept this photo and not the original source so if it's yours please let me know so I can give you proper credit via a link!

We all know a large sized quilt just isn't going to happen because I'd have to make about 430 yoyos to have a decent sized quilt. I don't have that kind of staying power or attention span and I'm fairly confident I'd still be making yoyos when they carted me off to the nursing home. A more realistic vision for my yoyo collection is that they'll become a mini quilt. 

The goal for today is to to finish the quilting on Beep Beep and get the binding on ready for hand sewing. I got overly ambitious with the back and now I'm pondering what to do with certain parts of the quilting so it doesn't impinge on my awesome design on the back. There's something to be said for thinking ahead when you get creative. Oh and I have to decide what I'm cooking for dinner tonight. And for the rest of the week .....I don't actually believe anyone cooks 7 nights out of 7- it sounds like some kind of urban myth.