New art quilt

I am making another tree quilt. Yes another :). I finished three Story of my life for the parents for Christmas and this baby quilt....

Having a baby quilt ready to go in my Etsy site. So now some fun. These leaves are being sewn on wash a way and I am going for an Autumnal colour, hoping it doesn't make a mess really :) I am using many different hues of green, this is the start. 

My garden is slowly growing

Tomatoes have gone crazy, which is great as the best tomato sauce is made with home grown tomatoes mmmmmm. 

Christmas was lovely and busy and I made too many cinnamon rolls so I had parties so that other people would eat the cinnamon rolls :) the problem is I really want to keep them and eat them all myself!!:) they are divine. 

I am now doing the Hasfit workouts everyday to combat the cinnamon rolls :) that way I can keep eating them right?:)

Jane

Gardens

It's a bit cooler today, so cleaning out the veggie patch is enjoyable now:) 

Well that took me a couple of hours but it is done!!:) now for more yummy veggies :) the kids will be so excited to have zucchinis and cauliflower galore!!:) 

Also working on this

I usually do more painted pictures, but my husband only let me know that he wanted me to make a quilt for a friend at work who is having a baby:) it still looks gorgeous. Beautiful fabric. 

This is my favourite

It is cinder berries and I love love her work. 

Here is my bed quilt waiting while I am shoving in the baby quilt 

    

The pile is so big it has fallen over hahahaha, that might take a while :) 

Got a pile of books out of the library and so far I haven't gotten into any of them, so back to Agatha Christie, the queen:), reading appointment with death. It's fantastic, of course :) lost count how many times I have read it:). 

Off to have a huge drink after all that gardening, and maybe some of that lemon slice I made..... Mmmmmmmm or even the mini raspberry and white chocolate hot cross buns I bought :).

Jane

Trees and school holiday

I finished the mosaic tree art quilt. I love it and had so much fun doing this one!!:) I am hoping to sell it on etsy for $1000,000 hehehhe. Well I think it's worth it. Imagine the sewing machine I could buy for that!! :) 

So I want a new sewing machine. I do believe I can hear my poor little sewing machine slowly dying. I can hear it slowing down bit by bit. So I am saving my money for a really great sewing machine. I am going to get a Janome horizon. Once school is back, I am hitting sewing shops and test driving that thing and seeing if it is any good. I will try other machines too, fun fun fun!:). 

School holidays are going a bit better than I thought. One more week left and I intend to keep them busy. We have been to the beach and swimming so much I still have water in my ears :) movies and friends over have helped with the arguing too. I am feeling good about myself that I only lost it about twice hehehhe, it's the arguing that does my head in!!!

Here's my future sewing machine

So now I have begun on a bed quilt for my bed, this will take me a while and I need to work out how long it actually takes me, as that's handy for future clients I think :)

Gorgeous colours aren't they!! Love them and I can't wait to see it all together.

Just read notorious nineteen by Janet Evanovich, I used to love these books, but his one I didn't enjoy so much. I know she has a few more, I am debating whether to try another. Such deep decisions!!! 

And talking about deep stuff.... Tv has come back from their break, and castle is a bigggg disappointment. Castle already gets you to suspend all reality, but it does help to at least have some semblance of a storyline!!. Anyone else seen the latest episode? It took me all afternoon to watch it due to school holidays hehehehehe

Now off to make dinner, I am getting my kids more involved in cooking, so my oldest is going to make dinner with my assistance :) burritos should be a good start :).

Jane

Japan trip

My husband just got back from Japan and got me some cool yummy chocolates mmmmmm 

So I will try the chocolates and let you know how the green tea kit Kat tastes :) hehehe 

Also working in this.....

So this is trying to look like a stained glass window :) it is so much fun to paint again after such a big break while making other quilts. I am loving blending and getting different hues to each colour. So fun.

Last week of school, I am going to enjoy the holidays, I have been sooooo busy these last few months. So will be looking forward to taking things a bit slower. Off to look at awesome photos of Japan and cool GoPro videos :) oh and eat chocolates :).

Jane

Wakfu Done

This quilt is Done! nice and fast :) Now on his bed and he is real happy :)

Now I can keep going on my next project, tree mosaic thingy :) lots of colour and lots of blending hopefully :) If it all works out.

Bought another ebook! I was such a staunch real book person, but it is so cool to have a book on my ipad and I don't have to wait for it to come out in Australia :) It's a Ben Elton book called Time and Time again. It's about.... time travel :) and I am totally absorbed :) Need to get audio books so I can listen AND paint, bliss :)

It's rained here, which is great for the drought, but not great for our plans to go to Kondalilla Falls, oh well another time. It is so gorgeous up there. More time to paint at least.

Jane

Finished, but....

Well I finally finished the quilt for my husband's cousin :) felt like it took me forever. But it always feels like it never is truly finished. :). Once I finished the binding, I then spent two episodes of Warehouse 13 cutting off the threads of the back :) it was fun watching the episodes :).

Have a look

My son wants a quilt now with Wack Foo written on it :) It is a tv show the kids have discovered. I am not even sure if that is the right spelling :) will have to work on that :) So I know what I am doing next.

Just had a big storm here and got a huge amount of rain in a real short time. It was so nice and now it is cool. It was so humid today, so the cool change is so nice. The only problem with the deluge is that is has flooded all the trains leaving the city and no one can get home. Bummer. 

Watching Life Below Zero at the moment, such a cool show. It would be fun to live in the wilds of alaska for a few weeks, but after that I would miss so much :) I would get a lot of quilting done :).

Jane

Been a While....

Well, not sure if anyone reads the blog, so I have stopped for a while :) Thought I might start up again and show my work in progress.

I entered two quilts into the Queensland Quilt show and my daughter entered one too. I didn't win but my daughter won for secondary student category with her own designed quilt...

And I got an email from the owner of  a big craft store here in OZ and she wanted to put one of my quilts on her blog!! Have a look here. It helped me feel better about no sales on my etsy store :) and not placing at the show. I love this art quilt and I am real happy with the quality of my machine work on this one.

I have made a pieced quilt for the first time in years!!:) and I loved it and it isn't perfect but I am proud of how well I did :). Now I am doing the free motion and loving it. I would loooove a long arm still, especially when it takes me weeks and weeks to do the quilt when I know it would take a few days on a long arm. But that's life :).

Have a look...

I love the difference between the plain quilt and then the machine quilted part. You can see how much impact the machine quilting has and how it makes the quilt look so much better.

Went to the craft fair and got a few things, it was so fun to shop for thread instead of just viewing it on the internet :) I wanted to see if I could find something new (to me) and see if it would work. And I did :) I went to one stall and found this...
It is a sewslip mat and it is tacky on the underside so it sticks to the board and the top side is all slippery. It is fantastic... except that it is already curling at the edges and when that tacky underside hits the quilt it sticks and I am stuck!! It is real annoying. I have tried blue tack but that doesn't work too well. I don't want to sticky tape it down as when you go to sew normally it won't move. So I need to remove the mat at some point :).

 

This is the annoying curl where it should be flat.


And this

Now the ring is made by Sharon Schamber and is amazing!! I no longer have to pull the quilt through the machine, I can just use this metal ring to manoeuvre the quilt around. It is fantastic and I am glad I paid $30 for it. The only thing I would have liked is for it to be a larger circle, so that you don't have to stop so often to move the circle and then have that stop start point in the quilt. Otherwise, it is great.



Houston quilt festival was just on and I love trawling the internet reading everyone's posts about the show and the quilts. I will go one day and spend a fortune :) and it will be so fun. I love seeing the photos of some of the quilts and just staring at them trying to work out how they did them!! That is cool. This was one that got me...

Hurricane by Jancke De Vries Bodinga

And this one, love this one...  Margaret Solomon-Gunn
It won judges choice.

I think all the quilts entered are amazing, and they all look so much better in person. All the machine work that has gone into the above quilt just can't be seen properly in this photo. I need to go :)

I am having huge struggles with my machine!! the thread is breaking and it is skipping stitches. I have spent hours cleaning and changing needles and checking tension and threading on the machine. Now I have found a checklist and am going through that. I didn't pay very much for it, so it isn't worth servicing. I think a new sewing machine for christmas might be a great present :). Anyone got any great ideas on how to fix these problems ?:).

Just tried some coconut and mango ice cream.... soooooooo good!! my fav flavour at the moment :)
Jane