So Big!!

 I thought that home grown might not be as big as store bought butttt just look at the size of this zucchini :)
We did eat it too, nearly the whole family :) I think it tasted firmer, not so sloppy.

Then I went to my favourite quilt shop, east coast fabrics and got this gorgeous laminated fabric. The chairs need recovering all the time since they get dirty, and I saw this and thought duh! :) so I got some and covered the seats today. They look fantastic.

This is my new design, I have sewn over it first and now am colouring in with this amazing paint. I love the paint and will do a review on it on my you tube channel :) wohoo.

One morning cooking for the kids, this came out of the pan :) thought it looked like a face....

It is so windy today!! gorgeous breeze though.
Weekend, wohoo sleep in.
Jane

Spooooky

Halloween came early for us, we're special :) we go to our church car park and have a 'trunk or treat' so it is nice and safe. Doing the make up was so much fun, the kids were impressed so that was okay :).

Cat Girl

A mummy

Zombie

They had such a blast, it was very fun and they are still on some horrible sugar high. ughhhh Oh well :)
I am about to start a youtube channel with free motion tips and reviews on products. Pretty excited about it and will post a link as soon as I am up and running.
Jane

Light Box and Review of Brother NX400

Now I am pretty excited about a few things. Obviously my new sewing machine, which I love love love. Thought I would give a little review as when I tried to find some on the net there wasn't many.

So the sewing machine is a NX400, and first off, great price at $750, I went to a place called Echidna sewing supplies in Brisbane and they gave me a trade in on my old clunker, very handy not many sewing shops do that, and so I got it for $650. It was on special from $1000. So that is brilliant. 

Then there is the fact that it is so easy to use, just turn it on and the screen shows you what stitch you are on and you can just change the width with a press of a button. There is even a button with a question mark on it, press this  and that has a manual built into the machine :) shows you how to get around the machine. I can save my stitches and load up multiple stitches for embroidery, which I thought was cool since it isn't a specific embroidery machine. 

What I also like is that it is quiet :) nice. And it sews so smoothly. I know that in about 4 years time I will wish this was still true hehehe but right now it is smooth. So far, I am very happy with it. 

Now onto  another thing, my desk is glass and my latest idea needed some tracing onto fabric. I drew it onto butcher paper and I wanted to have it transfered onto the fabric. I usually stick the design on the window and stand for ages tracing it onto fabric that way. So then now that my desk has moved and there is more light ( don't ask me why I didn't think of this earlier)  I came up with a great idea, why don't I put my lamp under the desk and tape the image and the fabric to the desk and trace!! well of course it worked :) duh :)

So quick too and I could leave it there and come back, because of course as soon as I sit down someone needs something or fights :) I wonder if I stood up would they bother me??

The other thing that is cool is the garden, I know I have been swamping the blog with photo's but it is cool!!

Zucchini and pumpkin

My corn :)

Look it's growing corn!!! :)

All those capsicums

Zucchini's again

So anyway, I am doing a new wall quilt thingy, and I have decided to try sewing the outline first then paint after. See if it works. 

Jane

Back

Well i got back a while ago, but life is so busy I don't understand what is going on. I cannot tell you what I have done, other than the normal school routine but oh well, maybe it will slow down next week :)

We had a great trip in Japan, the blog was a great way to share it. Have a read if you haven't already. We did so much walking that it took a week for my legs to stop hurting and my right knee will never be the same :) I feel old!

A couple of things, one, just a little thing but cute, Sam and I were on our daily walk and we saw a tawny frog mouth baby just sitting on the footpath :) it was soooo cute and adorable, we did the right thing and didn't touch it and when we came back it was gone, so mum came and got him/her hopefully :). We need to take a camera, the amount of wildlife we see if incredible.

The other thing is, my vege garden is bringing in the goods :) not a bucket load but enough. I had a big bumper crop of broccoli coming and while I was away the bugs got at it and decimated it. Darn. So I have pulled them out and will plant some spring onions I think.

The tomatoes taste amazing and there are so many so thats great. And the zucchini tastes yum but are really small,  I am interested to know how the farmers get their zucchini's so big :) I think my potatoes are nearly ready too so that will be fun and I am hoping they taste yum :)

Beetroot... hmmm not sure about this, tried one, didn't taste good so I will cook the next batch and see if that improves the taste :).

On another note, didn't win anything at this years QLD quilters show. Oh well, still selling quilts on etsy so that is cool. OHHH nearly forgot my other news......

This is my new machine :) after a huge amount of research, I got this. It is a Brother NX400, at first I was going to go for a very expensive model, over $2000 and then the more I thought about it, the more I thought that it was too much for a machine. So I looked up all sorts of machines around the $1000 mark and came up with some great machines. Then I saw this one, and thought it had all I would need, found out that it was only $750!! and went and had a look. When I used it, I found out that it has all the bells and whistles that the $2000 machine had that I was thinking of buying, wow! so I got it. Brought it home today and have been so busy since I haven't sewn with it, so tomorrow is sewing day :)  The neck is wider than my old one so that is a bonus too.

Also, back on the losing weight track, lost a kilo in Japan walking everywhere and not eating any snacks :) so that was a good start for me, so I was shown My Fitness Pal by Sam on the iPad and I love it, tracks all your food and exercise and is a great program to use for losing weight, so so easy. I do not like counting but this is not like counting at all, you just put your food in and it works it all out. So that is making the healthy eating plan easier :) Made the kids choc chip biscuits today and had to eat two warm of course :) best thing to eat ever! so it will be interesting to see how much that will be :).

Now I am off to relax, so so tired, and see if there is anything to zone out to on tv. I am sure there isn't :)

Jane

A different Outlook

I have hit Japan, we are doing a travel blog, so I thought that I would just post the link here instead of doing this twice :)

http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/chameleon.saint/2/1349427408/tpod.html?view=preview

Fun

We all went to Seaworld and it was great. It was a first for me and the park was a lot smaller than I thought it would be :) an adults perspective I suppose. The dolphin show was great and they were so gorgeous. 

The penguins were so amazing too but you really felt for them in their very very confined space. They must have been so bored. They just paraded up and down the glass looking at us. 

The aquarium was awesome and I took so many photo's trying to catch 'dorie' in a good light :) it was so funny, everyone was the same, every time they spotted 'dorie' they said look dorie!! :) Have no idea what the fish is :)

This was another cool fish, maybe they need to attach labels to their fins so we know what they are :)

This one kept going back and forth, showing off??

The rays did this all the time too, I am so sure they were all showing off for us :)
I have watched finding Nemo so many times, you can just imagine them having the conversations that the fish had, for instance, " watch this man, watch as I swim upside down, thats all i have to do to impress them, too easy" :)

Another important matter, I moved my desk from here....

To here.....

much more light and space, we are getting the kids a longer desk so they don't have to touch and fight, well maybe just touch. If I had stayed in the above empty space I would not have been able to get out, which would have been okay for a while since my secret stash of chocolate was under the sewing extension table :).
So now more space and light. Lovely.

7 days till Japan
jane

Broccoli!!

The garden kind of went to sleep for a while there when there was no rain, even watering it twice a day it wasn't the same as when it rained for 15 minutes and then the garden just bloomed! amazing. 

This is me modelling the latest look from the garden :) it was quite yum and tasted so fresh of course :)

Before we picked it, so cool

Slow growing beans and beetroot and pumpkin down the end, was hoping there would be vines by now

My awesome potato plants, they have really grown, and I planted four potato's out of my pantry and they have all grown!! wohooo

Corn!!

A huge batch of green tomatoes, waiting waiting waiting....

 bulging beans :)

My capsicum plants, they are flowering and about to give me well capsicums :)

He really loves broccoli :) really :)

Carrots, baby ones and we put them in our casserole and they were yum

 Showing off :)

 Anddddd I forgot to tell you that Sam and I on our walk a few weeks ago rescued a possum and her baby, she had no movement in her back legs and was just laying on the floor just off the path where we walk along the river. Her baby was wrapped around her neck and the horrible magpies were swooping and hitting her in the head, it was so horrible. We noticed that there was a canvas chair that had been left near the river and so we ran over and put it over the possum so that the birds couldn't hit it and hurt the baby. Then once we were home we rung RSPCA and the local carer came and rescued her.
Then today on our walk, coming down a tree was a big koala, and he was being chased by the magpies again!! We could hear them as they hit him on the head poor thing, so we ran around them with sticks trying to scare the birds off and the koala ran to another tree and climbed up it, but it wasn't one he could eat from so he went back down again and the birds went for him again. I had grabbed a banana tree branch and I was waving that and it kept breaking :) so then Sam started throwing rocks at the birds, one didn't even move:) we were obviously not very scary. The koala finally went as high as he could get on a tree and the birds just circled him. But it was so cool to see a koala that close and watch him run across the ground and climb up a tree. Very cool.

School holidays started tonight, so I think tiredness is going to be my state of mind for the next few weeks :) Must be positive :) Japan here I come.

Jane

New fun paints to play

I went onto a great website that I found called Kraftkolour and they had new products in and wow!! They had new metallic fabric inks and the colours were incredible, so I just had to buy some. Have a look at these.......

I got Cerise, turquoise, old gold, power red and firenze orange :) how cool are those names

And of course they look even more spectacular in real life and much more sparkly.
And the tubes behind are another type of metallic paint that sits up off the fabric and looks sensational too. So I am going to be playing with those in the next few days.

I also finished the baby quilt, and am quite happy with this one. I am about finished with the lap quilt I am making right now too, this one has been fun just to free motion over all the space of the quilt. I am hoping to finish it this weekend and then finish off another where it is swirls, of course:), and it will all be done with thread, all different shades of blue.
I finished a book the other day and it was sooooo corny and unrealistic and silly romantically, but I didn't miss a page or stop reading :) what is the go with that? I gave it to Sam to read as well and told her how bad it was so it will be interesting to see if she reads it all too :) Just finishing up a Dirk Pitt adventure, by Clive Cussler, it is far fetched too but still a good read.
19 days till I go to Japan!!! So excited. :)
Jane