I'm officially done- Week 7 and 8

I'm posting a day early because I just found out I have family coming to stay mid week and since my house looks like a pigsty and I dont want my mother to nag and I have to work tomorrow , after work tomorrow night will be taken up with cleaning the pig sty.

I had a high old time last Friday , finishing up my Christmas shopping .  Not only did I hit the regular shops but I wandered off to the op shops as well.  Crazy Bargains Galore!

I thought I was finished with shopping for Little P but when I saw this in an op shop looking like it had never been played with I couldn’t resist.  I love educational toys.

And this little fella was just begging for a new home. He looked so sad to be sitting in a thrift store and I got the feeling he was just waiting for me to wander on by so Teddy came home with me, had  a bath and is waiting for a little boy to be best friends with him.

I got 66% off RRP on this perfume by buying online and then they gave me a voucher for a further 5 bucks off  for registering an account which means the postage was free.    I went halves with Miss P which made the savings even better.

I spied this chintzy looking teapot in an op shop and pretty much shoved 3 little old ladies to the ground in my attempt to grab it before anyone else could lay claim to it. The gold accents are really bright and this photo doesn't do it justice. It's much prettier in real life.

I found a minky cushion in soft pink at an op shop.  I could pretty much touch this forever. I love minky. It was zippered so a quick wash and it was as gorgeous as new.

eBay helped me out with these finds and the price was within budget. Purchased for someone notoriously difficult to buy for but I think they'll be thrilled.

And someone is about to be dragged, kicking and screaming,  into this century, technologically speaking.

While these two items don't meet the thrifted or handmade criteria they came in under my individual allocations for gifts. Surely that counts for something?  

My local Goodwill was having a sale on this beauty and since I paid a small fortune for the last one I bought (although that one was green) this was a bargain marked down from $25.00. It's getting rarer and rarer to see these with lids and in decent condition. 

 I was oddly drawn back inside an op shop after I thought I'd found all the bargains in that shop to find this on a low shelf covered by an oven plate.

Which was especially fortuitous since someone in my family recently expressed a desire to own one.

I lashed out for Mr. P. It's been a tough year in lots of ways so I wanted him to have some laughs.

19 discs worth of episodes should just about do it and now you know how juvenile the humour in this house really is. Sometimes we even think farts are funny. Sue me.

And Mr. P must  have music to soothe his soul. Yes my husband has eclectic musical tastes.

The table runner for my Mum got finished this weekend. So did the matching coasters. Made from stash except for the binding which I had to go and buy after I stuffed it up at least three times. It's still not perfect. I'm sure the recipient will feel the love.

All the fur babies in our family are taken care of.

And this is done and I love it.  I hope the recipient likes it after all the angst this fabric has created. This was completely made from stash aside from the binding fabric.

And I completely copped out on three of the guys. They can treat themselves in the after Christmas sales.

And I bought them HUGE candy canes to go with the vouchers because I don't pay their dental bills.

Assorted glasses (can you believe some people don't drink coffee!)  and mugs with mug rugs for my work girlies. I need to make peppermint bark or cookies to go in cellophane bags to be given with these. The mug rugs were made from stash and the glasses and mugs were op shopped.

And most of it is under the tree, wrapped, waiting for the big day which will be bags of fun when Little P comes for tea on Wednesday night don't you think?

Next week I'll do a round up and a final tally and we'll see if I managed to stay within my original budget. I think I did! How is your Christmas present procuring going? Are you done yet ?

Done

I spent last Sunday quilting despite the usual threatened distractions. (Whispering: I think I am addicted to the computer. I stop what Im doing every 15 minutes to run in here and see what you're all doing ) I started  a quilt top the week before last from leftover Kashmir mainly because I was trying to ignore the pinwheel quilt. I am never working with pastels again.

Part of the quilting process involved trying to find backing for said quilt.  I don't love pastels so of course I had nothing. But I couldn't buy anything because these are "the months of living frugally" until Mr. P finds work again.  Then inspiration struck.  I'm the queen of chenille. Just as a side note I bought some batting this year that I ultimately didn't like a lot and that stuff is just lasting FOREVER - whats up with that ? It feels like I've batted 43 quilts with it. I only bought enough for two queen sized quilts ... 

Anyway "Kashmir 2  " is finished. I threw it in the washer and dryer and "crinkled "it.   Now here's where it gets interesting. I love this quilt.  And yet it's the same fabric as the pinwheel quilt which I think we all know I don't like.

Here's the back. Gorgeous pink chenille.

Here's the front...

See how different it looks without all that daggy white? I should have done this in the first place. I love this quilt. Too bad it's a gift and I have to give it away.


P.S. I don't want to talk about the pinwheel quilt...

Accolades, Op Shopping and a Crafty Dilemma

I went shopping on Friday to finish the Christmas presents, get a haircut and find an outfit to wear Christmas day.   The shops have started getting awful, people are being insanely rude,  and there  are going to be punch-ups in car parks because of all the stress. Everyone is starting to act like they're the only people who have to get things done. It's a jungle out there.  I like to keep it simple and avoid all that madness. I'll be posting the last of my Christmas haul over at my not so secret blog  (family not allowed) on Tuesday, so come on over and have a look then, but I wanted to show off some of my other finds from Friday.

I have wanted a soup tureen  for 22 years. You don't see them round much anymore and the ones in the op shops are often missing the ladle or the lid  or have nasty chips. My infinite patience was rewarded yesterday when I found this ...I was seriously doing the happy dance, and then I saw the price and it was like angels started singing. Now I just want to make a bucket of soup so I can use it.

I also saw this ceramic pumpkin and bought it for an autumn table decoration. Yes..I am turning into one of those "I must change my house every three months with the seasons" chicks. Nah ..I'm not. This'll probably sit languishing in a cupboard or get put on the table  when I remove this years Christmas decorations and get moved again when next years go up...

My Christmas outfit is taken care of. White capri's, white strappy kitten heels , jolly red top, and a scarf for some style.  All I need is some new jewellery. I'm thinking green so I really look like a walking Christmas tree. Most of this outfit was op shopped aside from one item. As usual my photography skills stink .

And I was gifted with some calico  bread bags this week from Freecycle.  I said I'd take them with only a vague notion that I could do something crafty with them . I don't know what I'm going to do with 40 of them. Ideas please? Anyone want a few? I am insane to be thinking about making a picnic rug or something out of these? Can any of you come up with something better?

Melissa graced me with a cherry on top award this week. How appropriate since I had cherries appear on my tree also. If you haven't met Melissa pop on over and have a look at her blog, clothwork. Melissa is insanely talented and her blog is like eye candy. Thank you Melissa.

Part of the deal with this award is apparently I have to tell you about three things I love and then tag three more people for the award.

I am not a big chocolate eater but I love Rum and Raisin Chocolate. This is my favourite. Love Rum and Raisin.

Obviously I adore both of these guys.  

And today I love this cat ...which doesn't happen very often because normally she is quite feral. Maybe it's a sign the world is about to come to an end, because she's being really cute and loving instead of trying to rip my face off.  

I'm tagging the following blogs because I think they're an uber-cool read. You should go check them out. They're all very different but eminently enjoyable.

Kirsten's Cooking -if it wasn't for Kirsten my family would get the same meals week after  week. Plus she just made 700 cinnamon rolls for charity.

Lisa at Git Down Kitty - one funny lady. She sews, she crafts, she finds weird things under her couch cushions.

Marg at Sunshine?Paradise? who is my soul sister in crafting disaster. It's so nice to have  friend who is as imperfect as I am in that department and doesn't mind sharing her flops (and many successes)

I just wanted to let the world know I love you. Don't feel obligated to tag along if you don't want to.

And now I'm off to sew some things. I may achieve greatness today  or I may not...probably not...meh.

Favourite Things Friday

Welcome to Favourite Things Friday! If you want to play along write your post, and link it to the linky thingy at the bottom of this post. Last week we had quite a number of people wanting to show off their favourite things as well as a couple of people who hadn't posted before. Welcome! I hope you'll be back to visit us again. The rest of you know the deal-play nice and visit the other awesomely cool FTF-ites and make sure you leave them some bloggy comment love.

Announcement : I'm going to continue to host  FTF for the next two weeks and then cut you some slack and take a bloggy break with it for few weeks because I'm sure we'll all  be busy with the Christmas/New Year /recovering from Christmas /New Year stuff so this is your second to last week to post for 2010.  So if you want to join in you have a couple of chances left for this year and then FTF will be back in the second week of January.

I have occasionally made reference to being a Virgo. We Virgo people like serenity and order and organisation. In fact when we don't have it - life can be very stressful. One of the things I do is to make lists. I love lists.  

I am  a serial  list  writer.  I have lists for everything. I even have lists for my lists.  I love crossing things off my lists. I use different coloured highlighters to cross things off my lists because it looks like a rainbow of achievement at the end of the week.

I have lists at work.  I have my "This is what I have to do today "list and my "This is what was supposed to be done yesterday, last week, and before last week ....ugh" list. I get quite stressed when I have a long list of things to do at work and it doesn't seem to be getting any smaller.

Mostly I write all my listy type stuff in my work diary which for obvious reasons I can't show you the inside of.

Sidenote: I used to cover my work diary with pretty papers but then they started supplying these black leather type ones which you can't cover so nicely. I think I might have to make a fabric cover for my 2011 diary...

I have lists for home. Usually two on the go .  At the moment I have a shopping list , a personal diary, a general to do list  and a list for Christmas. I have even written Mr. P a list ( he doesn't have a diary ). How can you know what you have to get through in a day/week without a list? Perhaps some people are used to relying on others to organise things for them hmmmmm?

This is obviously a list I made for this post because when I took a photo of my actual Christmas gift list I remembered that Miss P, Mother of Pyjamas and Sister of Pyjamas read my blog and I would have blown the surprises I have in store...unless I actually decide to buy Miss P an ant farm for Christmas.

This is my personal  diary - which I don't want to show you the inside of because it has riveting stuff like worm the dogs , get boots re-heeled, and organise carpet cleaners  written in it.

This is my current shopping list which I will have to re-write because it's not very neat...yep another affliction I suffer from. Terminal neatness.

Lists pretty much govern my life. Lists help me continue the illusion  that I am in control. Lists tell me what I need to do and where I need to be. My favourite things this week are my many many lists. And today I have a massive list of things to get through.

So are you a list maker or do you fly by the seat of your pants? Do you love lists or feel stifled by them?

Foiling the Birds, Slack Tea Thursday and Unpretty Oreos.

Several people commented on my previous post giving me solutions to my bird dilemma. Thanks for all the tips. I particularly liked JKP's suggestion that I counsel the birds and try mediation. Unfortunately although I am incredibly talented I do not speak cockatoo. I knew I'd regret that when I turned down the opportunity to study  "Bird-ese 101" in high school.    

P at The Way I Sew It left me this comment earlier today.

Sometimes you can hang shiny things in the tree to deter them (...it used to be aluminum foil pie plates when I was a kid), but that doesn't always work.

And I remembered when I bought umpteen million pie plates to make Bakerella's 43 layer cake and how I was too mingy to throw them away because I practically had to mortgage my house to buy them ....Those things are exxy.

I was planning to hand these down to Little P (and any other subsequent grandchildren I may have at some point in the hopefully distant future ) as ancestral pie plates. But needs must and all that - I want cherries more than  the look of gratitude and love on Little P's face when he gets antique foil pie plates on my death bed, so I took P's suggestion on board and made Mr. P climb the BIG TALL SCARY ladder on a slope and hang the pie plates up in that tree. Let's hope that does the trick because I'm pretty much over running out there every 5 minutes at dusk and dawn and shaking my fist and shouting at the birds like a crazy lady. (I was also apparently talking to the cat this morning and Mr. P thought someone was actually in the house so I must have been having quite the conversation -perhaps I am losing it)

 Check these out. Shared Lunch at work today.

Chocolate Dipped Oreos.

No - not made by a 3 year old with a 4 second attention span.  Made by me. In a hurry last night because I was busy doing my railing at the birds post. They don't look all that pretty (I don't do fiddly well )  but they tasted pretty good. For some really cute ones see Handmade by Heidi.

And tonight's tea is brought to you by the need to use up some stuff in my fridge. And my utter laziness at the thought of going to the shops to get anything more exciting.

Fish paste on toast (anchovette paste to be precise)
Yum!

Does anyone want to teach me how to easily make a photo montage? Email me and maybe we can broker a deal where in exchange for this knowledge I could send you a jar of fish paste. Anyone?

A Tale of Cherries, Cockatoo's and a Crazy Lady

About 15 years ago Mr. P staggered home from the local pub one night  and when he woke up the next morning there was a stick embedded in our front lawn. Nobody knows how it got there and it was simply assumed Mr. P had fallen into a tree during his walk home, (a regular occurrence or so I believe in those days )  broke the branch off, used it as a walking stick to make it home and decided to poke it into the earth on his way up the driveway in an effort to commune with the idea of gardening.

Before you get all up in my business because my husband was out destroying nature in a drunken stupor,  despite all the odds the stick took root and survived the next 5 years without being watered unless it rained. It grew taller and occasionally developed leaves. It looked weedy and struggled to survive and nobody loved it or paid any attention to it.

Then I moved in and informed Mr. P that we had pop up sprinklers (I kid you not despite having lived in this house for 7 years before my arrival he seriously had no idea we had an automatic watering system) and forthwith the lawn and trees would be watered when the government would permit us to use our own sprinkler system .  And despite the silver birch on our front lawn turning up it's toes and dying (which is very common with silver birch trees I understand so please don't call me a murderess ) the green tree survived and every year  after that grew taller, produced lovely green leaves and looked very pretty in summer.

Three years after my arrival I noticed red berries on the tree with the advent of summer.  Mr. P was righteously amazed when I excitedly  announced that they were cherries and that three years of tending to that tree in a proper fashion had rewarded us with the bright red plump berries. I made big plans to harvest the berries several days hence and started planning a cherry pie, and dreamed of the luscious cherry feast we could have because the harvest was small but looked oh so delicious.

Unfortunately we were not the only ones coveting the berries. A family of cockatoos had also spied them and were also waiting for them to ripen.  And ripen they did , in a two hour time frame one day when I was at work. And when I got home the tree was stripped because the cockatoos told all their friends and word spread like wildfire and every cockatoo in Australia had a feast from my meagre harvest of cherries that day.

I didn't get mad. I planned my revenge.

"Next year",  I ranted to Mr. P - "at the first sight of cherries I am going to throw a fruit net over the tree and guard those cherries most zealously until ripening time" A net was duly bought and I waited a whole year for the cherries to come. But they didn't appear the next year or the year after that or the year after that. I was crestfallen.

In the meantime I read up on cherries and realised by some fluke of nature our tree had been pollinated the year the cherries came to visit. I don't know how and I don't know why , and in the end I realised that this was one of those once in a lifetime dealios and that never again would we be graced by the red berries on our tree. So I gave the net away , and put my dreams of home made home grown  home made cherry pie out of my head.

 And this year my cherry tree turned on such a spring show - it was magical.

7 years have passed since the last cherry sighting at Maison Pyjamas. So you can imagine my excitement when this week these appeared on the tree...

There are hundreds of them...

And those bastard birds are back...and they're already stripping the tree.

So I've got me a swag

And a scare the birds away tool..

And this is where I'm staying until MY cherries are safely in a bowl in my kitchen.

Feel free to stop by for Cockatoo Cherry Pie on Sunday if you're in the vicinity. I promise I'll put the gun away.  


P.S. I guess I could race out and buy another net but that wouldn't be half as much fun and wouldn't make anywhere near as good a tale to tell would it?

Australia Post still loves me...

So...I've had my glorious  three days off and I'm staring down the barrel of "back to reality" tomorrow.

I started writing a post about all the wonderful quilting type activity that went on at Maison Pyjamas over the last three days.  The fact you aren't reading that post signifies that I didn't actually finish anything to show off.   Rest assured significant progress was made. I got two quilts to the "I need to hand sew this binding on to the back of the quilt" stage.  Hopefully I can have them both finished by this time next week. That would be good for making a dent in my WIP list. I've just about given up on the windmill quilt since I've been doing everything I can to avoid it. I'm thinking about sealing it in a light proof airless box and pretending it doesn't exist.

At least the postie has been good to me.

I ordered some fabrics online a few weeks ago and this glorious stack of yumminess arrived in the mail late last week.    I've always wanted to make a black and white and red quilt and it looks like 2011 will be the year.

Vesuviusmama  recently went on a fabric buying spree and decided to share the love with a giveaway. All you had to do was guess how much she spent while she was going crazy buying practically  the entire contents of a quilt shop that was closing down. I won because I'm a maths genius.  These lovely 1/2 yards of fabric arrived in the mail last Friday. I'm thinking Dresden quilt fans for the Dresden quilt that is on my ever growing list of " must make this" quilts. Thank you Vesuviusmama.

And finally,  I got my first Christmas card this week from Aunty Henny  and tucked inside was this gorgeous Christmas mug rug. Now I can be all festive when I drink my coffee and tea at work (while I'm counting down the days until my holidays!) Thank you Helen. It's starting to feel a lot like Christmas.

Like the crew of the Flying Dutchman, I am forever doomed to be hand sewing binding to the backs of quilts this week. I hope your week is more exciting.

Bah Humbug!

It is tradition that the first Saturday in December is Christmas Decorating Day. Christmas exploded with a vengeance at Maison Pyjamas today.

I love my house. It's small. It's cozy and it has a definite quirky feel. There are lots of "me " touches here. When the first Saturday in December arrives I feel equal parts of excitement and anxiety. Excitement because I get to see all the Christmas decorating booty  I haven't seen for 11 months.  Anxiety- because I will confess, I dont like clutter. And frankly all that green and gold and red throws the neutral feel I worked hard to create completely off. But I know it's only for a few weeks and so I live with it.

For a while it looked like Christmas had barfed all over my kitchen table.

This is what will greet you at my front door. Welcome. Come inside out of the blazing sun.

Except on days when I'm feeling anti-social. Then you can stay outside in the 9th circle of hell. Everyone has those days right?

Normal people have wreaths on their front doors. Not much here is ever normal.

Santa has already parked his boots in my entry foyer. I think he's planning to use my guest room. I guess it's not manners to tell Santa to bugger off.

My hall table- Martha I am not.

If you say Ho three times quickly it's swear word status is completely negated.

I finally found a use for that fish bowl I bought eons ago. I still cant recall why I bought it. Im not planning to get any fish.

 Earlier today you would have happened on one naked tree

and one fascinated cat...

Christmas stockings are hung on my unfinished dresser....

And, I'm ready to write Christmas lists.

And I wanted to share with you my first ever quilting and binding project. I made this years ago and it wasn't until I dragged it out of the box today that I realised how truly bad it is. It's heartening to know I've made progress in the time since then. The table runner is back in the box . I can do better.

And I present to you the 2010 Pyjamas Christmas Tree, which took all flipping afternoon to decorate.

This decorating frenzy is brought to you by the peer pressure of having American blog buddies who go all out at Christmas. Yes I caved in. I'm pathetic. I can pack all this stuff away the day after Christmas right?

P.S. You will be glad to know Santa came early this year and brought me new underpants...finally. Now I can have a medical emergency and not have to worry about cute young male doctors asking to see my butt.  I had so much stinking fun getting rid of the manky old stuff Im thinking of going bra shopping next.

What? It's not OK to flash your undies in public?