Keen posting!

My computer was right there, the camera was next to it, and I could actually find the uplink cable. So before I forgot to, I've decided to blog it tonight!

We were looking forward to welcoming new stitcher Rosie, but she didn't end up coming - perhaps my "see you tomorrow night" - written late on Monday night - confused the matter. Oh dear. So it was a small gathering tonight, with just Princesses Eleri, Alana and Kate in attendance.

Princess Eleri brought along a fabulous show-and-tell with the completed top (minus border) of her wedding ring quilt. Only has to be finished in a week or so - thank goodness there's a long weekend coming up!

And here's a close-up of one of the rings. The fabrics and sewing are just fantastic - all those curved seams. Wow!


Once the top had been ironed, photographed, draped and adored, it was time to contemplate the border and how to apPLIque it to the rings. Quite difficult, really.


Poor Princess Alana is sick with a head cold again after staying up late baking for the bake-off, but she still managed to work industriously on Prince Ed's jumper. Nearly one ball of wool finished (sssssh, only 16 remaining). Estimated completion date by winter 2009 :)


Princess Kate had intended to work on her interim emergency project (another gypsy skirt made from charm squares) while her fabrics wing their way from the US (brilliant website: http://www.hancocks-paducah.com/ for all your quilting needs. Hide your credit card first!), however conversations of fabrics and stashes distracted her, and so she spent some time searching through and sorting old boxes of fabric. After looking in the box labelled 'Evening Fabrics' (and finding some amazing and forgotten pieces), she resorted to opening the box labelled 'Mending and Incomplete' to find the 80cm of $120/metre embroidered silk that she'd never dared cut into. It was originally purchased for a corset, along with all the boning, piping and ribbon, however the prototype didn't fit and was too much of a pain to resize. So ideas were discussed about what to do with this incredibly expensive and stunning fabric - feature panels in a skirt, I think we decided.

Interim emergency project:

Very expensive embroidered silk:
(reflection from the silk is a bit strange - it is actually black).

Last week I was so inspired by the apPLIque jumper I was sewing for Della, that I stayed up late once I got home and kept working on it until the wee hours. Silly me. Here it is:

(oops, I see I should have flattened it better before photographing it - the arms don't actually have those big wobbles in them.)

I've been thinking of setting up at Etsy store for clothing like this and the skirts - what do people think?

Finished projects

It has been rather a while since I've done an update on this blog... Sorry princessi :(

Among other things, I promised I would post some photos of the firefighter quilt:

The finished quilt! I photographed it on our bed, so you can't actually see the borders or special corner squares...

A close-up of the border fabric and one of the corner squares. The corner squares came about when I realised that the pattern was ginormous and completely too insanely big, so I reduced the number of blocks (was 7x8, reduced to 6x6). Of course this was after I'd cut out all the pieces and made all the red squares. *sigh*

The label, and a view of the blue-flamed backing fabric (which was so completely JJ and was the inspiration for the rest of the quilt). The wording on the label had been all nicely spaced out, until a party a week ago when a number of people came up to me to ask if it was still OK to go in for the present. Teach me to be organised and to finish it well ahead of time! So I had to squish a whole lot more names on - including up the side too. Ah well.

Oh, to explain the 40th/10th birthday thing: her birthday is the 29th of February, so while she was turning 40 years old, it was only her 10th birthday.

JJ was totally amazed by her gift and absolutely loves it. Her father has said that the family now has a new heirloom :)

I had also promised to post the recipe for the apple crumble I made a few hostings ago. Hmmm. I tend to make this one up every time I make it, so I'll have to experiment to work out approximately what I did. It would have contained something along the lines of:

1 cup wholemeal flour (unless I used wheat-free flour?)
1 cup coconut
1/2 cup raw sugar
sesame seeds
sunflower seeds
walnuts/pecans
enough melted butter/margarine to make it the right consistency.

Not a particularly clear recipe - but Good Luck!

I thought I might also post a picture Della's skirt that I quickly ran up one night a few weeks ago. It didn't make it to a SnB night, as it was quicker to make than I expected.


I bought a pack of 25 pre-cut 15cm charm squares at Lincraft - and I had to add two of my own to make the proportions work right. The longest part of making this was working out the layout of which squares was going to go next to which. The pack contained fabrics that were the same pattern but in different colours - I managed to keep them from being next to each other in the rows, but failed dismally in separating them vertically! No matter. My overlocker made this project very simple, though the gathering was a bit of work too. I've bought another couple of packs of these squares, as I think they'll make nice (and cheap - the pack of squares cost $9.95, and the elastic would come to only about 40cents or so - so all up under $11) preschool presents - I'm sure Della will be invited to a few parties at some stages of this year!