Dreaming

While the first day of school holidays has been quite good, we took the kids to the pool and swam while it poured, already wet so why get out. Except for Graham who was a bystander and got wet for free :) who doesn't dream of something like this

Yes please!! Of course there would also be a full staff inside cleaning this house so I can sit out on the deck. And G working his butt off so I can sit out on this deck :) hehehe
I think I would have to move the sewing machine out onto the deck as well.
Back to life here where there is a flood warning for our region and it says not to leave your house. Nice. Supposed to be living it up at my brothers birthday dinner. Instead I will take my remaining Roses chocolates that I got off a wonderful teacher for thanks for what I did this year and get my escapism book and curl up on the couch. mmmm Nearly as good as this deck.
Jane
P.S what do you dream of escaping to?

Finished

I know that I said I had finished the Tree quilt a while ago and I did, I just didn't bind it. It has been left folded over my chair since and was getting a crease in it. So I thought that I would stop procrastinating and do it today. So here it is all finished.

I am nearly finished on the rusted vine quilt/drawing thing and next time I take a photo of it I am going to take it outside to get better light to get a better picture. 

Jane

Something Else

This is with my pencils, it is SOOOO much fun to colour in and shade.  It will be eventually vines with thorns, leaves and flowers all over it.

It never looks the same when I take a photo of them :) Not enough light probably. Anyway, just something little.
Jane

More

I have done Sam's flower, I am going to mount it on a canvas board and hope it looks like Art :)

And I have done some more on the painting, don't have a name for it.

That's it. Haven't found anything exciting to do yet... anyone with idea's?
Jane

I'm Blessed

Well another thing that I bought at the craft fair was some more dye and some dye thickener, sodium alginate it's called  and basically you put it in water and it goes to glug and makes every thicker :)

Looks like glug doesn't it :)

It can store in the fridge for months, and that's where it is, so here's hoping no one wants brown milk in the back of the fridge :).

So then I added dye powder and it gives the most vibrant and awesome colours. Here's what I did today....

Not finished of course, will finish off tomorrow and I have plans for another one with dark green vines and thorns and leaves..... so I will make some awesome other colours tomorrow.

Another thing I am working on is this flower that Sam painted ages ago and I said I would free motion it and make it sing.

So that's what I am doing tonight. I am using blue and purple threads together for the flower, it gives a really cool effect. So I think I am blessed because I can have these 'toys' and stay home during the day and play. I am very blessed. Now all I need is some talent :)
Jane

Two Things

Well, I just finished the tree quilt!! My back hurts from hunching over the sewing machine but I am so happy it is done. I still have to bind it but that can wait :) I am real happy with this one. I have taken more care and it is flat and even and dare I say it..... symmetrical!. One can only hope :)

Detail, I machine quilted feathers going up the quilt and when they touched the tree I drew it like they were being blown around in the wind. Or that is what they are supposed to look like :)

The other is silly but worth mentioning. Hubby bought himself a bigger fan for his computer, and I mean bigger.....

First I will give you a pic of his old one, see how you can see the brown around it? That is the motherboard, also note how low it is..

Now see the new fan...... it reaches to the top of the case! the side casing barely fitted back on and you can barely see the motherboard!! I think we could use this fan to keep us cool during summer :)

Well enough inane chatter, I am off to read the new Lee Child book and have another disturbing dream of men chasing and beating each other up. (This is due to the book, read a Lee Child there great:)
One day I will have to do something exciting just so I can write it here...
Jane

Something different

This is something I bought when I was at the craft fair. They are ink pencils. You put fabric medium on, well fabric hehe and then you use the pencils and they turn into ink. It is very cool but alot harder than I thought. So this is my first piece and I loved doing it. I felt very creative.


Pencils...

Design...

I am hoping to get better and bigger. I will quilt over it too, and make it stand out some more.
Jane

Mail Boxes

The Kids made their own mail boxes this morning and gave each other mail :) I think it is really cute. So we gave them mail while they were at school so they could have a nice surprise when they came home.

So cute, now I get to put them to bed. The oldest is in love with playing the recorder at the moment, and amazingly she is pretty good at it and I don't mind!!! Can you believe that. At the moment she has the music to Live by Shannon Noll playing and she is playing along with it. I am impressed.
Jane

Dyeing

I bought some dye when I went to the quilt and craft show. I have been waiting for some sun to be able to dye and yesterday was the day. Here are some of the results. This is something I have been experimenting with, it's called shibori and I am loving it. It is an ancient Japanese way of dyeing and it involves the wrapping of fabric around the pipe like I have done here and also clamping, tying and stitching. I am going to try clamping next. I have reserved some books out of the library to help me along.

So here I wrap the fabric around the pole, then push it down to one end to crease it. Then I pour the dye over it and let it soak and dry out for 24 hours. Next time I am going to try two colours, one on each end and see how that goes.

This is the results once I have wound it off the pole.

It looks even better in person. The colours are amazing. So this is my next project, to make more of these. I also bought some ink pencils at the craft fair and they are specifically for fabric so that will be what I draw with now. I just have to learn how to use them :)
Off to eat choc mint biscuits.
Jane

Too Many Green Leaves

Well, on my tree quilt I have finished my light green leaves. I still need to do dark green leaves oh and yellow and red leaves too. Hmmmm I think I might be over my tree obsession for a while after this.

Take a look

And here is the big picture

It has probably taken me two weeks to finish the green leaves. Everything else will feel alot quicker :)


I love these branches coming off the tree.

Going to the Brisbane Craft Fair tomorrow. My quilts are displayed but with no awards :( Oh well, keep trying I suppose. I will make myself feel better with buying something :)
Jane

Weekend Away

This past weekend was our weekend away, doesn't happen very often. Every couple of years in fact. And of course when we go away the storms go with us :).

View from our room

Gorgeous isn't it!

From our living room

It stopped raining for about an hour on Saturday morning so I went for a walk on the beach. IT was fantastic and exhilarating. Then it started to rain so I ran the rest of my walk. Felt great :)

After that it did not stop, it just got harder and harder. We were supposed to stay till monday but we came home early on Sunday night as it was raining so hard and the news said it was going to flood and get worse. I am so glad we did as the highway flooded and the traffic was insane. Plus the kids didn't go to school today either so that would have been a pain for Grandma and Granddad :) We still had a great relaxing time and feel rested.
Hoping it stops raining
Jane

Time Is Now My Own :)

What a school holidays!! It rained most of the time, so it made it real difficult to get out and about. But I made sure we were doing something nearly every day. Which meant that I was absolutely stuffed :) Monday they went back to school. I went visiting teaching in the morning and then cleaned the house for the rest of the day. Every day when I pick my son up asks me what did you do today mum?? (how gorgeous) and I told him I cleaned the house. What else?? he asks ha I wish there was time for something else :).
Anyway, over the holidays I dropped my quilts off to be judged - whooo!! here's dreaming that I place, I don't even care that I come first, 2nd or 3rd would be unreal. Prize money is $500 for 1st $200 2nd and $100 for 3rd. Not bad at all. I read a blog of another quilter quite regularly and in her blog today she mentions that she is judging the qld quilt show, hmmm she is very very good, so that means her standards are really really high, hopefully mine reach hers. :) They judge and let the winners know tomorrow... won't be going anywhere tomorrow. Oh and while I was driving to drop off the quilts, middle child tells me that she feels sick, two seconds later she is throwing up out the window hehehehe. I told her good girl for chucking out the window :) poor thing.

Look at this

My wonderful father in law made this for me. I have been searching the net for months and months to find one of these - extendable table- and they are a quarter of this size and at least $120 - $150. They are perspex instead of wood. Dad looked at making it out of perspex but he said it was insane the price they wanted. I love the look of wood anyway. It is 70 cm long and wide!!! Any others that I looked at were only 30cm w/l.
I covered it in clear contact to make it nice and slippery for the fabric and put gromets on the legs so it wouldn't slip on my glass table and it is the most perfect thing EVER :) I love it. It makes sewing 1000 times easier. As they say, I don't know how I managed before :)
Here is some of the tree in progress. I have done minimal stitching on the tree trunk as I wanted the paint to be seen still and all the different colours on the tree. Have a look.

Here's some of the leaves. I debated whether or not to stitch a whole leaf design over the organza in case I lost the sparkle of the fabric, but I did some with lots of stitching and some with outline only and it looked so much better with the whole leaf design. So here's to weeks of stitching thousands of leaves, and that's only in light green :). I am really enjoying though.

Well, on other matters, we watched Knight and Day - so much fun! It was definitely worth watching. Then we watched Robin Hood and that was brilliant. The acting was amazing. I think Cate Blanchet was fantastic. I am waiting to see The Sorcerers' Apprentice as that looks fantastic too. AND Survivor started and wow, I absolutely love love love this show. The first two episodes and I am laughing, holding my breathe and covering my eyes in shame for what they do. SO much fun.
Jane

The Surprise

Well, On Saturday we got the kids all ready and all week we have been telling them we are having a great family day out on Saturday and not telling them where. So we drove up to this place

The kids were so surprised and so excited. It was a fantastic day too. The first thing we did was feed Elephants, wow it was soooo cool. Take  a look

So after that we went into the croceseum and saw Bindi perform, the girls loved it - Aydon thought that it meant whinge time :) and then they came out with snakes

 He let it go and it went for a big swim, it was HUGE and it swam really fast!!.
Then all sorts of birds came out and it was spectacular seeing them fly out all around us

The top ones are black cockatoo's and one has deep red feathers in it's tail and the other had orange, they were absolutely beautiful.  And the Macau's were so much bigger when they landed on the handlers than they looked in the sky. They were amazing too. it was really hard to get shots of flying birds :), we have a few shots of sky with nothing in it and the roof hehehe
Then Terri, Bindi and Bob came out and then the crocodiles came out and they fed them and it was fantastic.

Along the way we came across this, so we thought - why not...

We then went to the Tiger show, but there were sooooo many people there, I think the whole zoo was there hehe and we didn't make it in time to get a seat so it was a bit tricky with the kids but they were amazing too

We have a few video's of them jumping in the water and playing around, but I will leave it at one video for this post. They were so big!! much bigger again than they seem in this photo.

The best part of the day for me was seeing the Asian small claw otters and I fell in looove,

We have lots of video of them swimming which was really cool as they are really social and they both mirror each other in every action, it was very cool.


We did lots of things in between each of the shows I have mentioned here, but these were the most exciting. There was so much to do that it kept us busy all day and we missed out on the pony ride but the kids were pretty smashed by then so we gave it a miss.
So all in all it was a great day and a great surprise for the kids.
Now I just have to get through school holidays, should be a breeze.... :)
Jane

A bit of a Miracle and other things

Well it's been ages because the kids have been pretty sick. One got tonsillitis and then the poor boy got multiple ulcers in his mouth. I counted ten on one side of his mouth, the poor thing was in so much pain, he even had them on his tongue. He has lost weight and so now he is even more of a skinny stick. But he is slowly getting better.

Get a load of this, I thought that to back the tree quilt I would need to go buy some more fabric, but I thought, no I have enough let's see if I have some in my fabric. I found enough, so that will teach me to look from now on. Then I checked for wadding and found that I might not have enough. I laid it out and...

I did a bit of cutting...

And.....

                                       

Here's the little miracle, I know it isn't much but it still gave me a buzz :) a perfect fit. So now I am sewing the branches bit by bit so that they blend into the background.

                                        

It's going to take me weeks and it isn't the most exciting thing I have ever done but it will be worth it. 

With all this sickness going round I forgot that I need to enter the QLD Quilters competition, I have 6 days to go, so I am taking photo's and trying to get the best look. Hopefully this time I will do better than last year. 

Here's one shot I took that I like

have a great rest of the weekend

Jane