Put a label on it

Yay! I have been creative this weekend. I made a fabric ball. So much fun and actually got me energized to create something. I have made a few of these as it is my go-to present for babies. 

It does not take too long and it is a fun gift to give.  

I made almost 2 of them as I went off and started without planning first.

I worked out that as it takes 20 hexagons to make a ball, I could make it with 4 flowers. I thought that these could be arranged to create a ball. I tried and tried even going so far as to make paper balls and then using a marker to draw flowers at different position. No luck, that which I wished would not work. 

I restarted the project and went with a random concept. I rummaged though the boxes of fabric and chose 20 pieces that seemed to go together. From start to finish it took about 12 hours. I am happy with the result. I am happy also to have had a needle and thread in my hand.

I put a cat ball on the inside of the ball surrounded by stuffing. The ball now makes a delightful tinkle.

The question now comes up of whether or not to sew a label on the ball, as it is for a baby. Do you add a label to the ball when you give the present? Do you just give the ball without indication that it was made

specifically for the person?

Is it just egotistical to want the recipient to realize that specific effort was used to create the gift? 

I have added a label. Hope the baby likes it's present.

Have an awesome day!

Granny's garden

I had always wanted to create a granny's garden quilt. I love the way that all of the flowers come together to create this picture.

I hand piece and hand quilted all the flowers.

The flowers remind me of family members and how together we paint a picture of who we are. 

I love seeing sunlight through quilts. 

The last stitch has been stitched and the quilt is done.  The center triangle were the pieces that held the boarders together. 

 This is the quilt all finished. I had gone through a whole spool of thread and a few packets of needles.

And lastly here is a picture of Taz. The silly cat has been missing for a week and I am so worried about him. Please send him "Come Home" thoughts.

Please vote for my quilt at Amy's quilt festival.

Here is a link

Have a lovely day!

Zen moments

Quilting for me are my Zen moments. I find each part of the process quieting to my soul. The vibrancy of the fabric and the act of either stitching the pieces together or quilting and embellishing the piece all bring calm. Here is a piece inspired by this.

Please vote for this piece at Amy's quilt festival or Click here

Serendipitous September

September is always a surprise. Will it keep being warm or will we be surprised by another dash of winter? 

The peach tree is wearing a coat of blossoms and looks glorious.

The garden is bursting with prettiness. The row of Lavender and Rosemary that we planted outside the study seems to have settled in. Flowers are appearing on the lavender and the Rosemary shrubs look nice and healthy.

They still have a way to go. Once they have grown to fill up the empty space between each plant I will be extremely happy. I love both the smell of lavender and Rosemary. A bucket list item of mine has been a Lavender farm, as who could ever be stressed growing lavender. The cats love to nap between the bushes. It could be the fragrance or it could be the stone wall that absorbs all of the suns heat.

The granadilla bushes that I was given for my birthday have now been in the ground for about 3 weeks and they two seem to have settled in nicely.

 The mesh that my husband put up for them seems to be working. None of the ones I tried to grow from seed germinated. It may have been still too cold. I will try again once spring has actually sprung. 

The pansy and the primula are from the seedlings that I planted in the rose garden. How rewarding little plants can be. Spring and autumn are when they will look their best. At the height of summer it is normally too hot.

I still have not done any sewing as I am still recovering from my op. I know. It is very tedious that this has now been going on for 10 weeks.

Hopefully soon I will be a healthy bunny again. I was feeling up to getting more info for may family tree, so things are slower getting back to normal.

Hope that this find all of you, healthy, happy and being creative. Have a good one.

August blowing in

August come blowing in with the promise of the end of winter. We have an election in 3 day’s time with all the parties not being people who I would pick in a normal world. I will choose the least bad one and vote for them. It is sad when you realize that the country that you live in does not represent you.

In 10 days time, I turn 57 and my sister turns 60. Where did all those years go? My father is still around, and I wonder how old it makes him feel having really ancient children.  

With spring being just around the corner, I have been preparing a new veggie patch. The patch has been cleared. Compost is going to be added. I have bought the seeds and in my normal way there is now a spreadsheet with all their info captured. I have the seed trays waiting and in a week or two all the plants that need to be sewn in seed trays will be in the potting soil. The carrots and other root plants will need to wait until September to be sewn into the earth.

We planted the spring flower outside the kitchen and it is lovely to see all of the Impatiens and Pansies in the garden. 

We have added 3 lavender and 2 rosemary bushes outside the study. The sun beats down on this flower bed and the cats seem to love to nap next to the nice smelling plants.

All of this gardening may have been due to last months battle to get better. I still have post op dressing over the whole in my side. My skin under the plaster is reacting so badly. We are trying smaller plasters as it gets better so that my skin can heal. The worst part is that I may need to have another op soon and then the whole process will start again.

I haven't done any sewing this last month. It does make me sad not having a needle and thread in hand. Maybe this month I will be able to do some. We have been sleeping under multiple quilts as it has really been nippy during the last few weeks. It is the middle of winter! We are so spoilt with mild weather that it takes me by surprise when it turns a bit nippy. We did have about 2 days where the temperature dipped to 2 degrees Celsius. BRRR. We do keep the windows open in our bedroom as the cats like to pop in and out so it does get quite fresh.

Hope that the weather has been treating you well and that you projects are plentiful and colourful!

Have a good one!

July: here is to a great month.

As the month of June comes to an end, I am sitting in a hospital bed. I have a horrid flair up of an infection I originally had 5 years ago. I have to admit that it started jiggling about a month ago and I tried to wait it out. Kathy's belief in ailments is that they will get bored and go away.

This Sunday however the pain won, I conceded defeat and have been here ever since. being under the weather is such a gross thing. They did surgery on Sunday night and just to show me that I was really bad, I am walking around with a drain. Major gross! The damn thing won't stop drawing and that is one of the pre-requisites to leaving.  The other is that my infarction levels were beyond ‘2 aspirin and call me in the morning’.

After a week of drippy antibiotics, I am happy to see that the infection count is now only 13 times higher as much as they should be.

That is an improvement, on Sunday they were 35 times the healthy number. “It is what it is” seems to be the doctors only comment. My husband is still a bit cross as he did tell me to see the doc a month ago...but you know.. School pick ups.. Projects...things.

Hopefully you are having a lovely end of the season.

Have a good one.

P.S. Though I do think that my husband having to give up a full day's playing is the thing that annoyed him the most.

He isn't very good at the game that he is playing, so he probably should have thanked me. Boys that play epic battle games, shouldn't think they can play a game where the character seems to be constantly running up buildings and the falling off them. So in a way, Sunday was an intervention to a horrid game.

 

Chilling in June

June is here and so is the chilli weather.

This cats have become extremely friendly and can be found most nights doing a cat pile in which we all contribute warmth.

All of the leaves are falling in the garden and our swimming pool looks like a witch's cauldron rather that a sparkling oasis. We retained a new pool cleaning company 2 years ago. The first winter they managed to keep the pool a delightful blue. The romance has obviously faded and the pool looks sad. It seems that you need to change companies annually to maintain the sparkle. The previous pool company and us parted ways after 7 years. The last year that they maintained our pool was a study in green. It was interesting to see how many shades you could get in one pool.

Our pool is the middle one.

I am still cutting up blocks of fabric which will be the basis of my next few quilts. So far, I have 1 and a half tubs of squares. The fun part will be when I heed to sew them to paper. There are still 4 tubs of fabric to go. I will set myself a challenge in getting them done by July.

I am still playing with the family tree. I am trying to find documentation for all of the people in the tree. I have been able to deduce so much from Death notices and grave stones. My heart can break with what pioneer women went through. I wonder if we retain within us the handed down sorrow that they felt?

Hope the top part of the world is enjoying their summer and the bottom half their winter.

May you have a happy good worker day!

See the teddy, her name is Wendy Boston and she is 57 years old!

It has been a while since I visited my poor neglected page. 

Well hello. 

I Have been doing some quilt related activity. I have started creating squares out of each of the pieces of fabric that I own. I am cutting either 5 or 6 block of each colour. I am onto my fifth large box and I still have 7 boxes to go. I mark each box with masking tape to show that I am finished with it. This may be either the largest quilt that has ever been made or I will be using these blocks for years to come.

I have always been fascinated by postage stamp quilts, and I think this should get it out of my system. I will attempt to the first one as a completely random exercise. Well I say completely, but, I was thinking of separating the blocks into light and

dark and then have the coloured randomly collected from either the light or dark box. I think this may make the whole quilt pop.

The other thought is to get a picture, pixilate it and then try and recreate using all of the colours in my block rainbow. I have some software that I used in the past to create cross stitch patterns. I am sure this would work.

The scraps that I have collected

These are not urgent decisions as I may be making blocks for a whole lot of months. The cutting of the paper square is going to take a whole lot of effort as well.

The family tree is coming along nicely. I am now trying to get all the documentation for each person. It really is interesting what information is out there if you look for it. When I hit a brick wall I have even found that Google can answer these sort of questions.

What I do find frustrating is that women are often not reported on.

Most men have a death certificate and yet there seems to be a lack of this basic information for most females. There are only two things that I think are happening. Firstly they may not have enough money for the government to need to worry about it, or secondly they probably outlive their husbands and their children are just not that efficient. 

I have also found that the hints of information can be the most frustrating. When you can almost see what happened and then there is nothing to prove it. I have found head stones to be the best as they have information cut in stone... 

Hope you all have been stitching in the last two months. I am please to have joined you again.

Have a good one!

March marches in 2016

I am sure that I have used this heading before. That is one thing about knowing your self, you become predictable. I was just about to go to sleep when I was shocked to realize that I had not done my first of the month post. 

Work has been chaotic. I was drifting off thinking that it is three weeks to the Easter break and that I really must decide what my next quilt must be. I don't think that Kathy's quilt is a do-er.  I really hate to give up on a quilt, so maybe I will keep the blocks to make a lap quilt or wait for inspiration. What has come to mind is a post stamp quilt. I already have a whole lot of 5cm by 5cm blocks covered. This may be a good idea. The blocks are the left overs from my Irish chain.

I could just ease into it by covering a whole lot more blocks and then just start with doing a grab bag and see how it goes. It will soon be the start of Autumn and the cooler weather will soon be here. 

The family tree is almost there. There are still some relatives that will have to remain a mystery. I have resolved my husbands family and found out way to much about a family that share my ancestors' surname but are not related to us. Is it stalking if the people lived 100 years ago but you have their photos and all their info? I hope not. I almost feel obliged to do their family tree. Weird the information that is out there that can be found out. 

It is time to do some stitching. 

Hope one and all are well.

February - flies in

 

Lake on ancestors farm - Loche Athlone

February is here. I don't know whether to happy or sad about this. Jan flew by. I went on a road trip and drove to a town named Ficksburg to attend a court case. It was a long drive down and a harrowing drive back. The harrowing bit coming from the fact that it was raining really hard and the highway that I was taking was full of huge trucks. My car felt the same size as their tires and each time I passed one, my car was buffered with water.

The whole Ficksburg trip caused me to ponder my family tree, as a relative in the past was shot dead there. I have since found out where he fits into the family tree. My genetics was in no danger. It was interesting to see all of the beautiful farm land. My ancestors were farmers and from the outside it really does look like a lovely life. I love modern technology, but the peace and quiet would be an amazing thing to experience.

Quilting has still not happened. I am hoping with cooler weather approaching, the inspiration to sew will return. This is the natural ebb and flow of interests. 

I have been doing projects since I was 6 years old. Television only started being broadcast here in 1976, so I was brought up with the concept of having something to keep the hands busy. The other thing is that in my career, I produce nothing that is tangible. In 20 years time, all the systems that I have written would have been replaced. Not that I will care, as in 20 years I would hopefully not worked for 14 years. 

The other reason for the lack of enthusiasm, is that I have made a quilt for each member of the family as well as few extra. As quilts normally take me about 2000 hours to create, I prefer that there is a need to be covered. My eldest should do her bit and create a grandchild so that I could be inspired to create various bedding requirements for the new family member. I have heard of children being had for all sort of reasons that don't make sense. Entertaining me sounds like a marvelous idea. 

Hope everyone is surviving the harsh weather that is going around. We will soon be in Spring and Autumn and hopefully the extremes will settle down.

Hope you have a good one.

A very happy 2106

Hope you have all welcomed in the new year. And are now awaiting the next  five hundred and twenty seven or so minutes that will make up this year.
I hope that many projects are completed and few exasperation are experienced.

I found this amazing quilt this morning. Inspiring and maybe an inspiration.

It looks like the perfect quilt for the time that we are now living in. We are now in the future. 

I do wish that the world stops being such an aggressive and violent place. 

Well that is about it except to wish you a good one !