Going For Broke

Friday I had a craft groove going like nobody's business.  I sewed pretty much ALL day. Crown me Princess Craft. I worked on my "Tis the Season" Quilt like a demon. I made binding , pieced the quilt back, finished the borders, cobbled together some batting and had it basted by midday. 

I gave myself a mental high five, told myself how awesome I was and went and celebrated by eating 6 Tim Tams and a half pack of raspberry bullets for lunch. One of the best things about having no kids in this house is not having to set a positive example. 

Fuelled by sugar and temporary insanity I did one border on the Flurry quilt and then realised I had made a huge and very noticeable error.  Since I was too lazy to unpick said error I tossed it in the corner and decided to ignore it. If ignoring Flurry was a recognised sport I'd be in line to win the grand final. I know some of you are wondering whether it'll ever get finished.

Little Miss Sunshine and I played Skype Sewing Friday afternoon/evening. TTS got quilted and I spent the rest of Friday night attaching the binding. By 10.45 pm it was done. I went to bed patting myself on the back and telling myself (and Little Miss Sunshine ) how fabulously talented I was. 

Saturday morning I got up bright and early vowing to kick Flurry's blocks. (You all thought I was going to write arse didn't you?  ) Something happened between coffee number 2 and 3 and commenting on blog posts and I decided it would be a shit hot idea to short list all the quilts I still want to make in 2011. For your information there are 105 days left of this year and apparently I've decided I can finish 6 quilts in this time , three of which weren't even started when I woke up yesterday morning. 

Notice I said "weren't " which implies that at least some of those quilts are started now. After all my holier than thou crap lately about finishing a couple of things before I started anything new I'm publicly admitting I am officially a bullshit artist. I can't help myself. I had to start something new. I have zero willpower. 

Since then I have sewed together 78 strips of the Tonga Hard Candy Batiks for the Merry Go Round Quilt. How cute do these look? I figure since they aren't actual blocks yet I can call it "fabric prep" which means I didn't really start a new quilt.

It wasn't all about ignoring WIP's this weekend.  I made the backing for the blue and brown quilt and started auditioning quilting patterns. 

Thea posted about a quilt she is doing at the moment and gave the pattern link. You know how sometimes you see an idea and think "I have the perfect fabric for that quilt in my stash". That's what happened to me when I saw this. So I emailed Thea to make sure she was OK with me shamelessly copying her brilliant idea and then I made a test block.

When it came together with no swearing whatsoever  I convinced myself that the quilting gods wanted me to proceed and I washed, dried and ironed my fabric in preparation for the right time to start some blocks. 

Which apparently was 47 seconds after I finished ironing . 

You're all wondering how long Flurry is going to sit in the naughty corner aren't you? 

I finished the top this afternoon. 

So basically this weekend I finished a wall hanging and a quilt top , convinced myself I was really ahead of the game and started another two new quilts that I have vowed to finish before December 31st. Madness . Shoot me now.

Favourite Things Friday

Welcome to a very special Friday for me this week. It's special because I went back to working full time in March for 6 months. As of today  I finally have my Friday's off again.  I love my Friday's off...I'm planning to potter and sew and spend time on the computer and possibly do some housework without the pressure of having only the weekend to get all the essential things done. 

On to Favourite Things Friday for this week. Feel free to join us . All you have to do is write a post about something you love and link it on up to this one. It's like one big love in where we all wander over to your place and have a look at something that is meaningful to you. It can be an object , a thought , something that happened to you , or a place. There aren't many "rules" at all. So feel free to link up and tell us all about one of your favourites. 

I think it's been well established that I am a planner. Holidays are no exception. I like the anticipation of deciding where and when we'll be going on a big holiday. I love researching what we'll do when we get there , booking  somewhere to stay and working out all the finer details. Often I'll plan all that stuff months and months in advance. I love going on holidays and for me a lot of the pleasure comes from the planning.

Our last "holiday" was in July 2009. We went to Darwin to await Little P's arrival since that's where Miss P was living at the time. Little P  inherited Miss P's lazy gene and decided to arrive a full two weeks late so I ended up staying in Darwin for three weeks. While it was nice to be away it was less a holiday and more a thrilling nail biting time counting down the minutes until Miss P went into labour. Everything had to be really flexible just in case. 

Dinner at Yots. My Favourite Restaurant in Darwin.

The exact moment I fell wildly hopelessly in love with Little P.

The year before that I went to Darwin to visit my sister for three weeks.  That was a holiday. There were a lot of cocktails involved. Which is probably what led to me thinking this was the coolest idea I'd ever had.

It washed off after a week. But I thought I was a complete bad arse while it lasted.

Me at Mindil Markets stuffing my face

In 2006 I went a little crazy and organised a holiday for Mr. P and I on the spur of the moment. Two weeks later we were in Surfer's Paradise. Just the two of us.

This photo makes me the envy of every kid I work with . I've canoodled with Wags the Dog.

In 2003 just before Miss P started high school we went on a theme park holiday.

Me in the Big Brother house . I am a serious BB tragic.

Miss P (looking a LOT younger ) hamming it with Fred and Wilma.

This trip down memory lane does have a purpose. This week I booked tickets for my next holiday.  I leave in just under 5 weeks and I'm heading here to spend time with Little Miss Sunshine and to see her part of the country. 

I suspect there will be a lot of these in my holiday future....

image credit

To say I'm excited is the understatement of the century. So my favourite thing this week is looking forward to my holiday and spending time with one of my best friends. 

What's your Favourite this week? 

Kate's 15 minute challenge

I haven't linked up to Kate's 15 minute challenge for a few weeks mainly because there hasn't been a lot of progress to report. I've been ignoring a couple of projects quite studiously which has been taking up a lot of time.  I did make some progress this week and so you get to see the results. I go back to my normal 9 day fortnight this week for the first time in 6 months so Friday has been designated "sewing  day". 

I spent some  of the weekend making these blocks for someone I work with who is undergoing treatment for breast cancer. She has discovered she likes sewing mixed textile quilts together while she's having chemotherapy treatments so I was happy to oblige by making a couple of blocks.

I've been in a bit of a sewing funk lately. I managed to de-funk this week and got all my Tis The Season Blocks finished and sewn together. I'm itching to start my next project but I'm on a promise to finish two already started quilt projects before I start the next one. 

Ok I'll confess. I slipped. But only a little bit. I had to try out the idea to see if it would work. Now I'll go back to finishing the other stuff (even if I am itching to work on more of these) 

  

Flurry finally saw the light of day again and got a teeny tiny amount of attention.  I WILL finish the top by the end of this week!

Goals for this week : 
Finish the Flurry Quilt top and start planning the back 
Finish the Tis The Season Top and piece the back 
Avoid playing with the Merry Go Round Blocks 


For more crafty reports pop on over to Life in Pieces. 

The Calm After the Storm

I give up. There is no way I can catch up on all the blog posts that have been written in my absence this week. I did try but gave up after commenting on 30 and responding to about 60 emails from my inbox. I know if I haven't commented on one of your posts from this week you'll forgive me. Next time if you could all stop posting when I go AWOL that would be great. Thanks.


Relative peace has descended on Casa Pyjamas again with the exodus of Miss P and Little P. My parents arrive tomorrow. I need one of those revolving hotel doors round here. I could dress Mr. P as a bell hop.

There was a fair bit of sitting in my pyjamas this weekend catching up with what has been going on in the world and stuffing my face with mini Wagon Wheels. And like Pavlov's Dog as soon as I wrote Wagon Wheels I had to go and eat another one. OK, four. I'm safe- I've finished the packet now. But there are 5 packets of Tim Tams in the pantry calling my name. Miss P brought me home a Tim Tam show bag from work last week and I have thus far studiously ignored it. 

I was inspired by Kris's Miss 14 who made these cupcakes a couple of weeks ago. They went on my "I must do that when Little P is here " list. They were a big hit and I'm dreaming of a career in Sesame Street cupcakes as my next alternative job.  Having done them ,  I think I could quite easily pull off Elmo cupcakes too. Oscar the grouch would be do-able too if you could get you icing to look khaki. Sometimes that happens to me when I'm not even trying.  I have no photos of the process since I was supervising Little P who was "helping " me as I made these. If you can kid wrangle, deal with blue icing and manage to put together cupcakes while taking pictures then you are a better woman than I am . 

In fabulous news,  we are a two car household again (yay!)having finally found a new car this week. The price was right and it has wheels so it's all good. Mr. P can stop catching two buses to work.  

I managed to spend time in the sewing room this weekend and worked on multiple projects. A couple of finishes are in the wind over the next couple of weeks.   More on that tomorrow.

Favourite Things Friday

I'm late to my own linky party today since I've been on Little P babysitting duty this week.  Is it still Friday? It feels like eons since I did anything remotely adult.  I don't even know my own name at the moment let alone what day it might be. I count myself lucky I remembered to put underwear on this morning and I take my hat off to anyone who is doing this with more than one kid simultaneously. Are you barking mad?  I've spent most of the last 72 hours thanking my lucky stars that Little P isn't twins.

I have been awoken at 6.00am two out of the last three days by a child poking me in the eyeball. Yesterday it was with a licorice stick and a little voice yelling " I want this Bella" .."Here you are Bella" ..."Wake Up Bella"..."Eat this Bella".I love that Little P has that much enthusiasm in the morning before I've had my coffee. 

Mealtimes have been an utter circus. Little P has had oodles of fun feeding Indy and Lola from his fork at the table.  It took me four years to teach those dogs not to hover over people while they're eating and that habit has been broken in a mere three days. I love that Little P likes to share-even if it entails me taking a half sucked Bertie Beetle to be polite.

Changing a child who doesn’t want to get dressed is like trying to nail jelly to a tree. Eventually I worked out a system that involved sticking my knee in his stomach to anchor him down which is probably child abuse. Over the last three days I have spent 9 hours of my life employing my unique child changing method. It works. I love that Little P thought this was a game and spent 9 hours squealing with delight and squirming like a trapped snake.

Yesterday I drove Mr. P  to work with Little P tagging along for the ride.  It was apparently imperative for me to get excited every single time we saw a bus , which in peak hour is approximately every 15 seconds. I was   in the car for 90 minutes. By my reckoning that means I had to get loudly excited 360 times without the benefit of a second cup of coffee.  I love that Little P still gets excited by a bus whereas I see them as a traffic annoyance. 

Sleep deprivation  makes you  temporarily insane. I took Little P  grocery shopping. The  designers of supermarkets have a lot to answer for. Even though they make the aisles two trolleys wide they don’t account for children who seems to have extendo arms like Inspector Gadget. How can someone that small have the arm span of an adult eagle?  I had all sorts of things in my trolley by the time I got to the checkout  that I know I didn’t put in there and my bill came to  $586.36. But I love that Little P doesn't know how much a 70 gram tube of Roary the Racing Car yogurt works out to per kilo ($19.95 ) and thinks that Lightning McQueen Kleenex somehow cleans up boogers  differently to  regular tissues. 

Little P got 25 new toy cars yesterday and  before he went to bed last night he couldn’t find two of them. This led to a meltdown with him sobbing “I think they’re lost  - we find them in Bella’s house tomorrow? “ I love that he had complete faith that I would find them and make everything right with his world again. 

And while some of this my sound like grandma griping and like I've had a shit time of it this week, I'm here to tell you that my favourite thing this Friday (and yes it IS still Friday because I checked ) has been spending a lot of this week with my grandson who thinks I'm uber-cool and can do almost anything. But my absolute favourite thing was when he climbed up on my lap and we had the following exchange:

Little P : "I love you Bella"

Me: "I love you more" 

Little P : "Not possible"

This Bella gig is pretty good. 

Weekend ADD

Sometimes I swear I have undiagnosed ADD. This was in definitely in evidence this weekend where I found it almost impossible to stick to one task for longer than 15 minutes with the exception of gossiping on the phone with a friend. I can do that for hours.  On the positive side being easily distracted  meant I actually made progress on a few things that have been lurking round here making me feel guilty.

I made my first log cabin block ever for Kat's cheeky quilt. If I can find a moment to scratch myself this week to get to the post office this will be winging it's way across the country to become part of a much larger quilt.

I lashed out and made butterfly cakes. They flew straight into my mouth. Bastards.

Flurry saw the light of day for the first time in weeks. (Insert resounding clap here ) I've cut and sewn the border strips. Maybe this week they'll actually get attached. Everyone else is working on their backing so I have some catching up to do.

Tis The Season got a look in as well. These blocks are finished. I'll have a global mexican wave for that achievement thank you.

And these are part way done. Remain seated.

Little P's quilt finally got a label sewn on it.  I was only prompted by the fact he puked on it and it needed washing. That helped me recall I had been avoiding the label sewing for three months. 

I'm baby sitting Little P for a few days this week while Miss P works at the Royal Show so I went shopping and bought a few clothes for him to wear when he visits. I went overboard. I'm going to have to change him three times a day to ensure everything gets worn. I am also insanely contemplating toilet training him while he's here. 

Then I realised I didn't have any bibs to keep those pristine designer clothes clean so I whipped up a few. Last time I did bibs I made 25 at once and got all bibbed out. These came together so quickly I'm re-considering a career in bib making instead of my regular job. I'd only have to make 7587 bibs a year to break even.

It's going to be kid central here this week so if I'm not around much babysitting either killed me or I'm in a corner sobbing uncontrollably because there's pee and poop all over my house.  

Favourite Things Friday

Welcome to FTF for this week. You can show off one of your favourite things by writing your own post and linking up so wonderful people can troop over to your blog and have a look at something that's made your week a little brighter.  Today marks the one year anniversary of the start of FTF and I'd like to thank everyone who plays along, comments and drops by and visits. I love reading about your Favourite Things every week. 

I'm not a knick knacky person. I like clean surfaces and lots of space. But occasionally I see something in my travels that I have to have and such was the case when I saw these two paper mache angels well over 15 years ago. The detail on these angels is amazing.

I can't even remember where I bought them now, but  I do recall how much they cost because for the time they were very expensive. Something about them really appealed to me and they came home and took up residence. 

These angels have been watching over my household ever since. They're my own personal version of Gog and Magog from the Anne of Green Gables Series of books. (Does anyone else love those books as much as I do ?) 

I hope everyone has had a wonderful week and is looking forward to a weekend doing whatever you like to do to kick back and relax. The sewing room is calling my name and I'm planning a full day in there tomorrow. 

Moving Right Along ...

It's officially the first day of Spring Down Under. Get ready to hand over the sun Northern Hemisphere-ites!


Thank you to everyone who commented on the Flying Dutchman quilt. At 80 x 80 inches it was the biggest quilt I've ever made. It was a real challenge to push that quilt through this space on my little sewing machine. I bet you're all even more impressed now that you know I sew on a very basic sewing machine aren't you?

Mental note to self: Always send massive (by my standards) quilts out to be  quilted by my quilting Yoda in the future. 

Since the Flying Dutchman quilt had been taking up so much space (both figuratively and literally ) I decided it was high time to concentrate on one of the other four quilting projects that are  lurking round here laughing at me.  And since the sewing room looked like it had been ransacked by marauding goats I decided that needed to be my first order of business because seriously people I can't find a damn thing in there when it looks like this. 

I feel much more creative now that I can see my grubby carpet. 

In other news, I've had very exciting mail in the last week from amazing people. 

Melissa from clothwork did this post a while back about some prototype purses she made.  I fell in love with the linen and lace one and following my comment and series of emails, during which I promised her my next born child, cried, pleaded , begged and cajoled, she sent me the purse as a gift. 

But that wasn't all...the parcel was a mite bigger than I was expecting because it also contained a pincushion (with Babushka's - I love Babushkas!) . And can you see that little pin that looks like cake? I wanted to eat it up. Thank you Melissa. It's all so beautiful. I really need to find a talent so I can swap pretty gifts with people instead of copping out and sending them Haigh's chocolate.  

And from Helen(who doesn't have a blog) who I met through Nanci , this gorgeous hand knitted mohair hat all the way from Canada. Check out that colour!  She also thought of Mr. P  and sent him a black Fisherman's cap which I am going to have to prise off his head come wash day. I really wanted to get a picture of me wearing my hat but I'm having a bad hair day and I'm not wearing any make up. I don't want to scare anyone. Thank you Helen. I love it. 

And a fabric delivery this week. I have been looking at Soul Blossoms FOREVER and finally jumped on the bandwagon and got some. This is not my "usual" type of fabric and now that it's here I have no idea what to do with it. I just didn't want to want some in 6 months and not be able to get any. That's addiction for you.

Lastly, I have officially turned my Mother In Law over to the crafty side. We went shopping for a sewing machine for her yesterday. Sadly, she now has a better machine than I do. And I've already told her she needs to leave it to me in her will.