Trip around the world baby

Sadly not "It's a trip around the world, baby!" as an early christmas present, but a scrappy trip around the world baby quilt for a pregnant lady here at work. It is made entirely from leftovers from other projects, which is suitable, as she is very good at recycling and sustainability.

Held up by  number two son inside, because it has been obscenely hot and smokey. There are a lot of big fires to the east, and when we get an easterly the smoke rolls in. The air quality is officially 'hazardous' and Australia had its hottest ever day this week. Roads to the coast are closed and likely to be so for some weeks off and on due to active fires and trees on the road ... all a bit depressing. Luckily I have so much work to do that I'll be in the office pretty much every day until the end of January, so at least I'll get airconditioning.

This quilt turned out very pretty and cheerful. And won't show the stains!!! Babies, hahahaha....

Baby quilts

I've taken a break from my solids fiesta to make a couple of baby quilts for babies-to-be. This one is based on colours from the blue and red print at lower right - I like blue and red together. And reasonably gender-neutral? I don't know if young parents are still stridently anti-pink for their girls, I remember my mothers' group all tried to be until the girls were about two and started insisting on pink everything. Or some of them did, some of them never cared.

Shoo-fly blocks with a nice red dot on the border. I got sent a photo of new baby on the orange and green baby quilt  - she is a very pretty little girl with a head of dark hair. Gosh my babies were bald. Until the first tinge of carrots came through :) We are off tonight to see number two son in the high school production of "Little Shop of Horrors". He is playing the dentist, which will give him the chance to chew the scenery in complete happiness. Although I shouldn't judge him in advance, it might be a subtle and nuanced performance. I will report back.

Here are the beautiful lilies our house guests gave us two weeks ago. Just tight buds then, and they have exploded into these wonderful pink blooms. You can smell them from the driveway! Absolutely beautiful, I must remember to buy myself flowers more.

A baby quilt

I have had so much fun making another baby quilt! I haven't done one for ages, and they are so quick and small and delightful to do. This is draped over the footstool - I was having trouble taking a photo that showed the colours properly.



This is for a friend at work who is due in a few weeks. The baby is a girl, but I don't think they're going all crazy pink, so this is reasonably gender neutral.



Although I did quilt it with flowers.



I remember being eight months pregnant ... what a nightmare. Kind of cool in that you were actually growing a baby, but eight months is definitely the point at which you can't ignore it any more! Every time you try and do any damn thing - even sleeping - that baby is there. Galumphing from side to side and hiccuping.

Another weekend, thank goodness

After a busy week at work it was good to have Saturday roll around today. And it's definitely spring ... I did the usual 5km run round the lake and the blossoms were out. In fact the blossoms are almost past - slack off a week or two with the running and the trees march on without you. It's the first weekend of Floriade too, so lots of people out and about.



This is the latest finished baby quilt. It was going to be for the school fiesta but a friend bagged it for a present, which is lovely, and now it's done so I must drop it off. It's a fair swap because she introduced me to Chat 10 Looks 3 podcasts, which is two Australian political journalists, talking about books and movies and tv shows that they enjoy with a little bit of life in general. And they put me on to Malcolm Gladwell's revisionist history podcasts, which are awesome (or the ones I've listened to are, I'm looking forward to the rest). Podcasts are good while you're sewing and trimming and ironing.



I did different types of quilting on each stripe of the baby quilt because I didn't think an allover design would suit it. And it was fun to try out different types of things. I went back to my shape by shape machine quilting book for some ideas. As ever - some more successful than others! I sewed down the binding while watching the Broncos v Cowboys NRL final last night - it went into extra time and was quite gripping. I don't watch footy much during the season but I like the finals.

The yellow one

And here is the yellow baby quilt - and the last one, thank heavens. I have enjoyed making these small projects, but now I'm back at work I only have a tiny amount of creative brain space, and this is sucking it all up. Whenever I see something on a blog or in a book that looks interesting I have to put it to one side until the baby quilts are done ... and that's not how I operate at all. I like to leap on every passing fad, run down every momentarily available rabbit hole, and not be oppressed. Yet another reason why I could never turn quilting into any kind of business. Imagine that burden of having to make money from it! At least with these I knew I could stop whenever I wanted and no-one would really notice. And I'd still be able to buy groceries.

Once all the bindings are sewn down I'll take photos of all of them for the blog. I quilted them all differently so I can use them as samples for the future, when I forget what I've done. Yay for blog! Sadly our weaving course has been put on hold as the tutor's mother is very ill, and she has had to go back to Europe. We will make up the lessons at some point, but I was absolutely getting a taste for it - you know what it's like when you get something new and you just want to do that! I am restraining myself from just buying a loom and going weaving-crazy ... must finish the course first THEN go nuts.

 

The pink one

I quilted the blue log cabin baby quilt in something allover and loopy, and pinned up the pink one. Here it is - barn raising arrangement - not that there are many arrangements you can do with only sixteen blocks.



We had a quiet weekend; the weather was cold and bleak and windy. Number two son organised a bake sale down at the local shops on Saturday to raise money to buy books for the school library. He and his friends were annoyed that the library didn't have books on the topics they were interested in (Beginner's Japanese and How to Draw Manga); so they researched whether bake sales were legal, checked with the grocery store they could put a table out the front, made a list of everything they needed, then baked, set up, and sold everything within an hour! I was very impressed. The mums had a few double checks around hygiene and a cash float, but other than that the kids did it almost entirely themselves, and raised $110. I took them to the mall Saturday afternoon and they bought exactly the books they wanted and are handing them over today. Wow.



This isn't bake sale related - these are the birthday biscuits I made for my husband. It is better than a cake because he can take the leftovers into work and we're not faced with a large cake to try and eat. Neither us nor the kids need any extra sugar in our lives. I used this recipe, which involved making a chocolatey dough, then wrapping it around a caramel with some sea salt.



As with most American recipes you have to do a bit of guessing because we don't have the exact ingriedients ... the jersey caramels worked well, and didn't leak out the bottom at all.  I put birthday candles in them, and we had one each which was more than enough, and with any luck they are now giving my husband's work diabetes and not us. Speaking of health, I did have a sinus infection, so caved in and took some antibiotics, and I'm now feeling much better. Finally goodbye to the plague.

Back into it

OK, plague week is over and we're just going to pretend it never happened. The painters are done, and it looks amazing, and I'm back at work catching up on whatever is happening here. I'm still coughing and blowing my nose and looking like a bag of shit, but feeling much better. At least no-one doubts it was a genuine illness, even if they are not very keen to sit next to me.

I finished up some more baby quilts on the weekend too. I lost a bit of enthusiasm for being imaginative and decided to do three log cabins; one pink, one yellow and one blue, and all with the same neutrals / whites as the other colour. So I did a marathon cutting sesssion then pieced them all at the same time. Here is the blue one pinned up ready for quilting. Not very exciting but I always like log cabins. Traditional but not too boring.



I went to the quilt fair on Saturday too - it's the annual Canberra Quilters' exhibition as well as a craft fair with lots of stalls. The show seemed a bit smaller than other years, but maybe they just spread it out a bit more. It's not juried and open to all members, so as usual it was a mix of the good the bad and the truly ugly ... but I like that, and I like that it's not all intimidatingly good quilting; but some of it was amazing! The overall winner was exquisite - beautifully made and a well-balanced and appealing composition. I liked everything about it. Other than that though I didn't agree with any of the judges' picks, as usual :) The modern quilts in particular were a bit of a yawn - I am either getting old and grumpy or the modern quilts are starting to re-use a lot of the ideas ... either way it doesn't look as exciting as it used to. I will wait for the Next Big Thing (and ignore it to continue to make log cabin quilts to my own dubious standards). All the winners are here.

Keeping on with the list

I'm still pottering about through my last week of leave; trying to do useful things and enjoy myself at the same time. With limited success ... I went to the doctor on Monday for a regular checkup, which always makes me sad and cranky. Not because my GP is horrible - she is perfectly lovely - and not because there is anything wrong with me - I am perfectly healthy, if a little overweight - but because she checks me over for everything to do with "older women". A phrase used about four times, along with "women in their 50s and 60s" and even once "we have to watch out for this in the over-60s". I am FORTY FIVE YEARS OLD. But the cancer drugs block the hormones, and I have suddenly been propelled into early old age.

And it shouldn't matter, but it does, because now every time there's a news item about hip fractures, or joint pain, I prick my ears up, because that's me, and if that is me, then I must be that white-haired lady in the pastel track suit they're using to illustrate their news item, and when that happens about a dozen times a day, your picture of yourself starts to change. (You will be pleased to know that my bone density is well within normal range, although according to the technician it is "perhaps 2% lower than last years, so something to keep an eye on". I don't like perky 20 somethings telling me to keep an eye on things, so I asked her what the margin of error in the scan was. It's 3%, so I suggested I would not worry about it right now, and she thought that was probably OK.)

So most of the time I am able to think of myself as in the prime of life, one way or another, but every so often I get smacked with the reality, and it takes a while to re-adjust my self-image back to the comfortable lie of 45 (nearly 46. Unsurprisingly, I am not bothered about turning 46. It is at least ten years younger than my body actually is). I knew the doctor would make me sad, so I planned happy things to do afterwards, which I had to cancel because number two son threw a most unconvincing sickie. Which turned out to be quite genuine and the poor little tigger slept almost the whole day while I moped about. It was raining.



But, on a much better note, I made another baby quilt. I am not sure what this block is called but I have made it before because the drawing was in my notebook. I have pieced seven now, so well on the way to my target.

More baby quilts

The second half of the week wasn't quite as productive as the first half - horrible weather for starters, which made me want to lie on the sofa with a blanket and a book. And more social - I met a couple of friends in a bar for drinks on Thursday evening, and had a lovely long lunch with a friend on Friday. The bar was quite trendy and full of young men with facial hair, but mostly lit by candles so no-one could see that I didn't fit in. Or see anything really. The sound system was driven by a turntable on the bar playing vinyl records .... apparently that's a thing now too. I'm so OLD.

The grey and yellow one is the one I did down at the beach - here it is quilted but not trimmed and bound.  Just four simple Jacob's ladder blocks (or I call them Jacob's ladder blocks, there is a wide variety of block names out there) and quilted in my favourite repeating kites. I'm piecing the batting which is very satisfying. I have a tub stuffed full of offcuts that I can't bear to throw out - but it is such a pain to piece them for anything large that I always end up cutting new lengths from the roll. So piecing just two or three bits for these tiny quilts makes me very happy, and I've used about half the tub.

This just a single block - one over-sized Lemoyne star - but I like the border fabric with its little paw prints. I might need to do different quilting on the different bits of this. I'm trying to get away with an allover pattern (and a single colour thread!) wherever possible, but I don't think I'll be able to with this one. Still, the quilts are so small and easy that it's not so much trouble to change threads. I am still enjoying making them, but I must do some binding to catch up with myself, before it becomes a chore.

Snow flurries

Canberra's weather nadir - the dismal forecast "snow flurries" - is due for tomorrow so the boys and I are escaping to the beach, where at least it will be 15 degrees, not 5. The awful thing about "snow flurries" is that there's usually no snow, just low grey clouds, biting cold and horrible wind. Actual snow would be quite exciting and unusual.

It has been very lovely here the last couple of days without having to do any painting - now we are contemplating door handles. The ones at the hardware store are very boring, so we're going online for something more exciting in the cupboard knob department. And there are billions! We will have to make a decision on them quicker than our normal four years because we are having trouble getting to the towels (with no knob and I won't let them touch the paintwork, it's quite a challenge).

Here is the latest baby quilt - green and yellow trip around the world. I quilted the other pink one so progress is on target.  Another reason for going to the beach is that I put my sewing machine in for its regular service yesterday, so I need to go and visit my spare sewing machine for a few days. We have also got movies, recipe books and we went to the library yesterday .... and a couple of bottles of wine for me, just in case the children get cabin fever and drive me to drink. Yes, it's a short trip.

The baby quilts

Here are another two baby quilts, one ready for quilting and one quilted. I'm still having fun with these. I quilted little flowers on it.



I'm trying to do a variety, for people with different tastes, but it's hard not to do what I like. So they are mostly being quite scrappy but with quite clear colours, to suit me. Oh well, if they don't sell it doesn't matter, I will take them back and give to them to friends.



The election on Saturday was a bit of a fizzer because there was no result - too close to call and lots more counting needed. A minority government is no bad thing really, because it makes them work together to get things done, but the uncertainty isn't fantastic.

We are ploughing ahead with the painting - it is indeed a great big pain in the arse because of the design of the house - perhaps even more so that we were expecting. It's not like a room that you can shut off either, the hallways are needed and quite narrow, so you spend a bit of time trying not to bang into each other and then moving stuff around so the kids / dog / cat can get past without knocking everything over.

Number two son has performances of The Frog Prince all week to hordes of schoolchildren (which he enjoys, with a bit of eye rolling) and number one son is proving very useful at painting (again, there is eye rolling). I thought it might only take a couple of days but we've been at it two days now and still have to do one ceiling and a complete second coat, so might be all week....

Monday - 4 km run, went to the hardware and bought paint, rollers, drop cloths etc, quilted baby quilt, spakfilled.
Tuesday - masked, sanded, painted.
Wednesday - painted.

Proper winter and some sewing

I can now say it is proper winter in Canberra - minus five last night and a high of 8 degrees today - that is not very warm! And it is cloudy and bleak, unlike yesterday which was a proper sparkling winter's day. I went for a run yesterday morning in short sleeves even though it was only four degrees ... I know from experience that if the sun is shining then it doesn't matter what the air temperature is, I am going to get BOILING HOT. Because I have a minimum two-inch layer of insulating blubber everywhere on my body - I have been caught before with thinking I needed a long-sleeved top and ended up boiled like a lobster. Skinny people run (past me, at speed) with gloves and ear muffs and neck warmers but I know better. Here are the trees round the lake, completely bare of leaves and very wintry, but the air was sparkling and crisp.



I have resolved to make ten baby quilts for the craft fair at the school fete later this year, which is one every two weeks, which should be perfectly possible. Here is the first one before I pinned it up for quilting. It's quite fun picking out patterns and colours and making a nice small quilt before moving on to the next one. I can experiment a little bit, and use up some scraps.

And I have just started six weeks of long service leave! Isn't that a long time? I have been hoarding my leave, and just sort of watching it grow, but then when I realised how quiet my work was going to be until Parliament sits again, I thought why not? Part of it will be school holidays, and for the rest I have an extremely long list of projects and chores and things I want to get done. Our development application for another bedroom down the beach house got approved, so there might be some building work to supervise too (although probably not, we will have to wait until the builder fits us in). In the meantime though I have a Very Big List On The Fridge to work through ... and another nine baby quilts.

The other baby quilt

If anything, this is even simpler in design, but slightly brighter in colour. Again, gender neutral with a leaning towards yellow! And my favourite kites quilting design - very easy when you're working on a grid.



I had a left over strip from piecing the front so used it in the back. This is a bit bigger than the other one, so I couldn't find a single piece to fit the back. Because I order a yard at a time, I try and limit my baby quilts to 36" square, so I can back them with a single piece. But sometimes they end up a bit bigger.



Gosh, what else to say? More wintry weather, both here and at the beach, more holiday time doing very little, lots more cakes and biscuits baked by the boys, and lots more sewing for me. Sometimes the best things to do are the most boring things to write about...

A tasteful baby quilt

At least, I think it's tasteful! And hopefully gender neutral as well. It might be slightly girly, but I think little boys should have as much yellow as possible. We painted number one son's room yellow for him before he was born, and he had a few fabulous orange jumpsuits and overalls. Anyway, there are a few pregnant bellies around, so I made a diversion this week into two baby quilts - I still have to finish the binding on the other one, but I'll post photos when I do.



And the backing fabric matches, most unusually. Simple shoo fly and meandering type quilting. It was fun to do something so small, it's been a while.



The first week of the school holidays has drifted by in cold winds and rain. Lots of computer time for the boys, sewing time for me, and occasional forays to the shops. I have made half hearted suggestions towards museums and cultural amusements, but no one was very enthusiastic. We have caught up with a few friends, which has been lovely, and walking the dog seems to provide enough fresh air for us all. My main focus has been trying to keep the washing under control when the sun refuses to shine. Small problems.

Warming up

Spring really is lovely in Canberra - winters are cold and summers are hot; but for a few weeks in September and October the world is green and fresh. We're enjoying the back garden; mostly because the back fence is down and hasn't gone back up yet, so we get the vista of our neighbour's back yard as well. Theirs is two thirds amazing vegie patch and one third immaculate lawn (so much better than our scrappy grass disaster). The main concern is keeping the rabbits on our side of the invisible line.



Baseball started again today and number two son and I walked over to watch the end of the game. Except we missed it because it took longer to walk than I thought. It was 5.3 km and took an hour and ten minutes. We'll know for next time, and there will be a next time because I'm walking that little critter every weekend - just because he cried off baseball doesn't mean he gets out of exercise.

Number one's team was like every first game of the season; not entirely sure they remembered how to throw a ball. The main activity was all the parents freaking out at how the cute little kiddies from the under 10s or even under 8s have turned into great big under 14s ... mostly pushing six foot and six inches of that growth has been since last season! I know all parents of early teen boys go through this, but it is just astonishing. They all still hug their mums though - nearly bowling them over in the process - see how long that lasts...

So to counter all this exercise we've just been to the Indonesian Embassy Open Day - lots of people, dancing, raffles and masses of stalls selling delicious Indonesian food. We sampled widely.



This week I made a quick and easy baby quilt for a new baby boy. Simple piecing, straight line quilting, but should be fit for purpose.



I like the dots and stripes together - in hindsight I should have used it all through the quilt and not just in the binding.

A baby quilt

I had a few five inch squares left over from the "Circles of Concern" quilt so I made them into a quick little baby quilt - I took the very pink ones out to be gender-neutral, but there were still heaps of the yellow and green. I really can't count very well.



Quilted in my favourite kind of square meander, very easy and not too dense for something that is meant to be snuggly.



It has been a quiet and wintry week here - the only excitement was when our drains backed up Wednesday dinner time AGAIN ten days after the plumber reckoned they were fine... we got them back out and the guy cleared some more blockages all the way to the fence but the main problem was actually off our property so he had to call up the water company. Amazingly, they turned up within five minutes, spent twenty minutes shouting with torches and machinery and cleared it all out! And apparently we can get reimbursed for the cost of the plumber! (I have yet to investigate that one, sounds slightly optimistic but I will give it a go). And it was cold when the laundry flooded, so as the dinner burned I was paddling about with a mop in one hand and the phone in the other ... in toilet water ... as the outside temperature went below zero ... boy was I cranky.

A new niece

I have a new baby niece! My husband's brother and his partner have another beautiful little girl ... which is very exciting and she is very cute from the photos. Hopefully I will get to see her in the flesh before too long - it's been a while since we've had any babies around! My brother in law is my age and I must admit I feel way too old to be dealing with a tiny little baby, but I am probably aged beyond my years. (And what made me so old? CHILDREN)

Anyway I made her a wee quilt, which I shall post this week now they have chosen a name (although they can't agree on how to spell it apparently, I just made a stab on the label and if it's wrong well, yay for mad aunties). Not a great photo but you get the idea.

This is the backing fabric - birds! I like the green on this, it's very fresh.

Another quilt along!

I don't know what's happening to me, this is the second time in a few weeks that I've engaged in some on-line trend. I usually avoid them like the plague, but the Penny Patch caught my eye - scrappy and straightforward. My favourite! I didn't follow the instructions though. I couldn't be arsed lining all those squares up the same way, so they just go wherever they want. And I used genuine scraps, so the colours aren't quite as glamorously co-ordinated as they could be. And I thought it was looking too pink, so put some plain cream squares in where there should be the smaller penny patch squares.



I asked number two son to hold it up for me - he protested that his arms weren't long enough, which is nonsense, so I made him do it. He kept protesting, which made number one son pull his arms into his t-shirt and crawl across the floor moaning "my arms are so short, help me, I'm a mutant with tiny little t-rex arms...". So I suggested he get up and hold it himself for a while. Which he did.



I think next time I will stick with just pegging it to the clothesline. But it will make a good toddler present for any wee girls of my acquaintance. Fun to sew and easy to quilt - I'm still going with the baptist fans although this is a modified version. I had a heap of leftover blocks because I am incapable of counting, so I put them on the back which always looks nice. And intentional! Which it wasn't.

A much nicer picture

Yes, Isabelle is quite right, the world does not want or need close up pictures of my bruised appendages. And it is not broken - I'm moving around quite freely and it's going into the lighter stages of violet, yellow and green. Here is a much better photo for you - a little baby quilt I just finished for a two-week old baby boy.



I needed a pattern in a hurry - I had already made a quilt for this baby but number two son took it into school for a favourite teacher who is very pregnant ... and of course he only mentioned it the day before she was due to go off on maternity leave! But I was wasting time on the internet (as usual) and I saw a few people were doing the Starburst Quiltalong. Perfect - a striking simple pattern that could easily be adapted to a smaller size. I didn't quite follow the instructions and made it with half square triangles because I thought it would be easier. Probably wasn't, but worked for me. And I quilted a sunburst for the starburst!

Back into it

I'm back at work and the boys are back at school and I'm also back in the sewing room ... which is lovely. I haven't quite decided what to make next because I want to use the stuff I've been dyeing. And so I have to think about it a little bit before I start chopping. Not a lot of thought, but a little bit, which is more than usual. In the meantime I finished up the baby medallion quilt. I did the top a while ago.



I don't think I mentioned but I did two of them - twins! Two baby girls, so two quilts kind of the same but mostly different. It's quite fun to do - almost all the same fabrics just in a different pattern. And with different quilting. I like them both.



The babies have been born so I'll pop those in the post soon ... actually posting them is always the part where I procrastinate! I don't know why, it's not exactly difficult, and I need the space on my shelf.