I'm back!

Hey!

I'm here!

I'm still on wireless but I have been told that I can now get broadband so in a coupla days, I'll be cruising the information superhighway like I haven't in years!  When will I quilt?  There's too much internet to see with so much gig download allowable!  Movies!  Songs!  Podcasts!  Ebooks!  All the treasures of the universe are out there for me now!

I've been sewing a lot while I've been away from the blog, and have a couple of finishes for you.  They are all rather boring, I admit.  I've started so many things over the last twenty years and I think the reason they have stayed UFO's for so long is because they are pretty average and boring to do, and even more average and boring to look at.  I am eager to get as many of them done, so that I can can begin the business of creation and start to do some really pretty things.  One day....

But for now...

Blah. 

This is something I'm not immensely proud of, I don't like it and it's toooooooo much but it started as a design for the shop and it just didn't work.  So it got bundled up and chucked in the 'don't wanna work on it' pile for YEARS.  But now it's done.  I'm thinking that border is too wide so I'll probably cut that back before it gets quilted.  If it ever gets quilted.

Now for number two:

This was another design we had done for the shop.  It was based around the border print, a most delicious design by Jennifer Sampou called Rainforest.  The original shop design had taken parts of the border, like the fish and the birds and we'd appliqued them randomly over the log cabins.  It looked so pretty.  But we didn't have enough fabric to finish this one that way, and so it remains a little bare.  But this is another one of those twenty year old UFO's and therefore I am very proud it's done.

Finally, the oldest UFO I have in my cupboard.  And I love this one.  I'm emotionally attached to it. 

My apologies for the crap photo but I don't have anywhere to hang it.  This was begun before I was married, before we had the shop, before I'd ever quilted before.  It's got the hair of old dogs and cats long since gone on it.  My dad was alive.  When I pulled it out of the bag, it smelt like his cigarette smoke.  He's been gone nearly as long as this quilt has been started. 

It was a design from a Family Circle magazine, and it was all template based, and done in centimetres.  Now, Australia is a metric country but for the last how ever many years, we have done our quilting with inches, just like the rest of the world.  I put this design away because at the time, I didn't know how to adapt a pattern to inches, and it was all too hard.  After twenty years of designing and quilting, I know now how easy it is to fudge a bit here, make a border a bit wider to fit the flying geese in, all of those little tricks. 

This one will definitely be quilted soon.  It's supposed to have a further border on it, but I've run out of so many of the fabrics that were in it.  They were those lovely Joan Kessler florals from Concord that were EVERYWHERE a decade ago.  Now it's all trendy and modern and not my style at all and poor old Joan Kessler fabrics, I don't know where you would find them these days.  I think it looks fine.

So that's my show and tell for today.  I hope you liked it, and I shall see you tomorrow.

Suzie

p.s. I haven't forgotton about the block of the month instructions.  I'm still waiting for my Nancy Halvorsen fabric to arrive from America.  It's taking a lot longer than it usually does.  I'm so terribly spoiled with your American postal system.  Sooooo much faster than the Australian one.

Still on a go slow

My internet is still not working quickly.  The technician who was going to ring on Friday (hand on heart, I really truly promise) didn't ring.  Of course.  So I have the weekend on a go slow. 

It's amazing how quickly we get used to the finer things in life, such as fast internet.  I can only get wireless here, though the technician is supposed to be ringing me to tell me that I can get ADSL broadband instead.  If that happens, I can go from six gigabytes to one hundred gigabytes.  I doubt very much even I could use one hundred gigs. 

But I need him to ring back and confirm it.  Why is it that no one follows through on what they promise?  I pay these people good money and yet they'll get to it in their good time.  I don't think I'm too pushy, they promised they would ring on Friday, and they didn't.  I think I have a right to be cranky. 

And it's our national phone carrier, so my choices in transferring to another company are fairly limited. 

Anyway, it's letting me post words, just not pictures so until tomorrow, I hope you have a good weekend. 

Suzie

Hello again

I've not been away, but I have had the double combination of visitors (so no time) and slowed internet.  Not a good combination.

I've been sewing quite a bit though, and have really got down to business with some of my oldest UFO's.  The one I'm working on right now is older than my marriage, and I've been married nearly twenty years now.  I should be finished soon, so I'll show you my photo then.

I can't show you anything now, because my internet is slowed, and even though I just spent an HOUR trying to upload one measly little photo, my computer went all 'Oh no you don't...' and so I can't.

So, I'll try again later, when the computer is behaving.  But I've taken lots of photos and when I do get back into the land of the living and have appropriate internet speed, I'll show you all of them.  In one hit.  You're welcome!

Talk to you tomorrow.

Saturday

No time to take photos as promised today.  I don't know where my time goes, I really don't.  Kids, shopping, laundry, cooking, cleaning.... where's the sewing time in all of that?  Don't you love how you work your butt off and get to point zero (house clean, clothes folded and ironed and put away, dinner cooked, dishes done and put away - you get the idea) and in five minutes it's all gone pearshaped and you're further behind than you ever were?  That's my life at the moment.

Still.  I doubt my life is any different to thousands of other working mothers.  I'm luckier than most, I guess.

So some pictures for you.  What shall I show you today? 



Ahah.  Here's some.  Long before I had my own children (I was an older mother) I had the pleasure of becoming auntie to four delightful girls and one lovely nephew.  When the girls were smaller, I lavished home made gifts on them.   Here is a couple of quilts I made, which I have been told were much loved and much washed.  And that's all I wanted - I didn't want them to be put away in a cupboard.

Both of those girls are mid to late teens.  Bit too old for teddybears.  But I think they've kept the quilts safe.   I hope so.

Till tomorrow,

Suzie

Quiltville

I'm supposed to be doing my shopping list right now.  That can wait.

I've long been a fan of Bonnie Hunter at Quiltville.  This is one of her designs, http://quiltville.blogspot.com/2005/06/smokey-mountain-stars.html or Smokey Mountain Stars.  It turned out ridiculously delicious, and was all from my five inch square box.  I make a lot of scrap quilts, and most of them look very nice, some of them look okay.....not brilliant.  And a rare few look delicious.  This is one of them.

Tomorrow I'll be spending some time photographing some of the things I've finished this week.  It's been productive for me, lots of after hours sewing while DH is away working.  I can get lots done if I don't have to talk to him every night.

That's a joke. Mostly :)

******************UPDATED************************

So I've just checked my hotmail for this account which I forgot I even had and I found a whole heap of comments over there. 

I'm so sorry, I feel like a terrible blogger!  I didn't know that you were posting over there too and that some of you have been having trouble commenting directly on the blog.  Especially Tiny - I've done as you asked so now hopefully it'll be all good.  I'm still really new to all this, so please forgive me if I don't respond quickly, or if I don't respond at all.  It's not me being rude, it's more me being a doofus because I don't 'get' blogger very well yet.

*********************************

Till tomorrow,

Suzie

Birdlover

I've been working on UFO's today and have nothing photo worthy to show you, so I dug this one out of the archives.  I didn't make it, my clever mother did.  My husband is very keen on birds of prey, and this is an Australian Wedge Tailed Eagle.  She gave it to him for his fortieth (a little while ago).

I think she's a smart cookie really.  I'm not sure I have that patience.

See you tomorrow.

The Quilt That Started It All

You know, the scary/sad (I can't quite decide) thing is that I'm sure I still have half a dozen more pastel quilts.  I do actually quilt other colours, too. 

This one was for my first daughter, and it was a Chook Shed design.  I'm sure it will be known to Aussie Quilters.  I've seen a lot of them.  She loves it.

And more pastels....

Love, love LOVE this one.  It came from my favourite book 'P.S. I Love You' by Possibilities.  It was template done, and I didn't think I could make it, and I totally did!  Now it needs handquilting and I'll try to get to that sometime before I'm ninety.

And even more pastels.....

I have two little girls.  I have a lot of pastel quilts.

But wait, there's more pastels....

Here's another pastel quilt...I admit that I did get new fabrics for this one but the scraps all went into that big bag full.

This one was made for my no. 2 little person.  Again it's a Chook Shed design.  Their patterns work so well for little people.  Her original design was a lot brighter, but I wanted cute and girly and fun and I think it totally worked, don't you?

S.

More Pastels

When my daughter was born, I cut a swag of pastel fabrics to make her a wall quilt. I kept all the bits of fabric that were left over in a bag.  It was a big bag, admittedly.  And I have just kept on making quilts from the leftover fabrics.  This is another one of the quilts I made from the same original fabrics.  It's amazing just how many quilts you can make from one bag of fabric. 

That would be a good challenge to have one day, wouldn't it?  A bag of fabric, and the winner is the person who can make the most projects from it.  With the least amount of leftover.

My bag is fairly empty now, and I have lots more quilts to show you that I made from it.  But this is just a little one, from a Chook Shed design.  I made many, many Chook Shed designs over the years.  I suspect a lot of us Aussies did.

More tomorrow,

Suzie

Show and Tell

I'm actually pretty proud of myself.  The things that blogging forces you to learn in relation to the computer is pretty terrific.  Till now, I've been taking photos, editing them in Picasa, saving them, writing a blog post, adding them in and then publishing the post.  Lots of steps and difficult at times. 

Turns out I can eliminate half of those steps by publishing a blog entry directly from Picasa.  The internet is clever.  Clever, clever internet.

So this is the quilt that I made for my daughter, that was supposed to have yesterday's block included in it.  But the maths got too hard with all those squares, and fitting that block in was like trying to fit a square peg in a round holl, so I just finished it off.  Her room is done in these pretty pastel colours (she's only little) and the box of leftovers is getting pretty grim now.  Which is a good thing, but I need to finish a few outstanding UFO's (like yesterday's) before the box runs out totally.

You can see I've taken her name off from the quilt.  I want her to make her own decisions about how much information is out there about her online, not me.  Hopefully it will be years before that decision needs to be made, because she is far too little to know about computers (though she totally knows how to play with the Ipad, let me tell you).

Tomorrow my other little person is at kindy so I will have a blissful child free morning.  I could use it to clean the bathroom, but more than likely I will get stuck into the UFO box.  Which means, hopefully another blog post to show you tomorrow night!

Till then, happy quilting.

S.

Sunday Funday

So today my DH (and I mean dear in the best sense of the word) took my two little people out for five (yes, FIVE!!) hours.  I love that man.  I sewed and cleaned and watched what I wanted to watch on television.  It was bliss.

I fished out this UFO:

I've a few other half appliqued blocks to add to it, and a few squares to cut out, and then hopefully soon I'll be able to cross that off my list also.  It was a block that was leftover from another quilt (it didn't really work where I wanted to put it) so I made more blocks to make a bigger quilt.  I could have just put this on the back of something but I tend to start new projects with leftover old ones.  I suppose that's part of my UFO problem.  Not knowing when to stop.

Anyhoo...

I had a productive day - I stitched a few folder covers and diary covers for a trading table our quilting group is holding, and I finished my paper bag challenge, which had a deadline of next month, so I'm doing well!  The covers looked very boring in the photos, so I won't show them off.  I couldn't find a tutorial online that covered exactly what I wanted to do, so I made them my own way and I'm actually quite pleased with them. 

So all in all, I'm feeling refreshed, accomplished, and I'm ready to hit Monday morning running!

Till tomorrow,

Suzie

Scrappy fun..

Don't you hate days when technology doesn't do what it's supposed to?   A few weeks ago I was very clever and put my own Farmer's Wife Sampler chart from Electric Quilt into this webpage.  I had to save it as a jpg and it was all really smart of me, because I'm not the cleverest person on the internet.  

Now I don't know how to do it.  It's gone from the memory banks.

Which makes the above picture pretty uninteresting really, because the whole point of this post was to show you that I drew a block in EQ6, and then made it in real life, and aren't I clever....except I aren't.  I can't work out how to stick the EQ6 block online.  

So trust me, not so clever.  I'll keep looking online.  I know I saw it someplace.  The internet isn't *that* big a place, I'm sure I can find it.  Oh yeah.

Hope everyone has a nice weekend, see you tomorrow!

When life gets in the way

Life has a habit here of sneaking up on you and tapping you on the shoulder, then when you turn around, it slaps you in the face.  Just to remind you that there is actually other things than quilting.

I have some little people.  One has been sick, and now as she returns to health, the other is getting sick.  Both are Very. Crabby.  Indeed.  Consequently, not much at all has been done in the quilting/crafting/anything fun department.  And to top it all off I've lost the digital camera so I can't take any photos of anything right now (which makes me very, very cross).

I'm aware I've promised block of the month details, and they are definitely nearly ready. 

But for now, here's a picture of something I did a year or two ago.  Just for some eye candy.  Wayyyyy much louder than I thought it would be, which is why it's only a table runner and not some a whole quilt.

Till tomorrow,

S.