April Showers Mug Rug Hop

Hi Everyone - today is my day for the April Showers Mug Rug Hop.

Thank you to Madame Samm for this fun hop and thank you to our cheerleader Erin!

April to me means cups of tea with my best friends and starting to get ready for the warmer months (mmm wine and cheese). We don't usually get a lot of rain in April in Sydney, but this April has been all over the place! Beautiful sunshine one minute and thunderstorms the next. There may have even been some puddle jumping with my 2.5 year old the other day. I am not sure who had more fun...

Anyway onto the Mug Rugs! I tried some paper piecing for the first time in practice for making a bigger quilt for one of my tea loving friends. I came across this great free pattern at Piece by Number for some teacups and thought some Mug Rugs would be perfect for my practice runs of paper piecing. I decided to make 4 - one for me and each of my 3 best friends.

I am also a fairly forgetful person so I decided to personalise them with some embroidery on how they take their tea. So here they are!

For my Tea obsessed, everything is better in pink, make sure you have an extra litre of milk when I visit friend - a dainty floral number!

For me, a frilly umbrella rug. This fabric was, let's say "borrowed" from my mothers sewing room many moons ago.

For my shoe loving, likes very sweet tea friend I could not look past some gumboots!

and finally my scrabble loving, would prefer a glass of wine friend but is slowly coming around to more cups of tea friend. She is also know to decant the odd bottle of wine in her awesome frog teapot.

And all of them together with our favourite mugs.

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you have been enjoying the Mug Rug Hop - there is still a day to go! Oh and in roll those storm clouds *as she rushes to get the clothes off the line!  Here is today's schedule

Wednesday, April 17

Jen @ Quilter in the Closet

Marjorie @ Marjorie's Busy Corner

Elita @ A Pieceful Perspective

Green @ So Sew Green

Mara @ Greco Mara

Wendy @ Why Knot Kwilt?

Gmama Jane @ GrandMama's Stories

Debby @ Debby Kratovil Quilts

Britt-Inger @ Hill Valley Quilter

Connie @ Freemotion by the River

Beth @ Words and Stitches

Kathy @ iHeartSquishy

2013 Q2 Finish-a-long

I have decided that I actually need to start finishing some projects and get them out of my sewing cupboard. I have so many quilts that I want to start but then the momentum starts to fade when I think about the other projects... So what better motivation than blogland! I am linking up for the 2nd Quarter Finish-a-long at She Can Quilt. 

So my goals for Q2 

1. Spinning Stars Quilt. According to my flickr stream I actually finished the quilt top back last October and I think I had the quilting done by the end of November so that just left the hand binding. I hate hand sewing and teamed with the Australian Summer and me being in my last trimester of my pregnancy it wasn't going to happen. I have done about a quarter of the binding so I just need to find something on TV that I can bear to watch to finish it up!
REQUIRES: Binding 

2. A Car Quilt for MissE. When I was going through my scraps a few months ago for my scrap vomit quilt I also started to fussy cut some prints to make a car quilt for my little lass. Kinda a rainbow eye-spy film strip quilt. As we are getting towards winter it might be a good idea to knock this one over!
REQUIRES: Finish blocks, Quilting and Binding

3. Washi Bedspread. Oh how I have neglected you beautiful Washi!Shame on me. The size daunted me to quilt. But as I am getting more confident with Free Motion Quilting I am convincing myself I can get this quilted on my good old Janome.Very ambitious for me to add this to my list but I would love to see some progress on it! At least getting it out to photograph is a start.
REQUIRES: I need to add another border for size, Quilting and Binding

 

4. Kids Quilt #1
REQUIRES: Just needs two borders and to be quilted and bound

5. Kids Quilt #2
REQUIRES: Just needs quilting and to be bound

So hopefully this will help with the momentum. Fingers crossed my 3 month old continues his good run of sleeping and my visitors don't mind a messy house!

Sew Mama Sew BOM2

Just when I thought I was not going to add anything additional to my "things" list for 2013 look what popped up!

I am already doing the Skill Builder BOM run by Alyssa and am loving it! So I convinced myself to do this one as well - on two conditions. Again, complete stash busting (no fabric will be bought to complete this quilt) and it has to align with another project. It runs for 6 months, and hey my sister-in-law is getting married at the end of October ... lightglobe comes on ... Perfect! Their colours are purple and green but I think I might stick with the purple for this one.
Block 1

The only problem is that I seem to not have anymore of the dark grey. I have many other greys or maybe I can alternate the purples for the different backgrounds. Will have to wait and see for the next block as it is a bit of a mystery.
I love the jumbo sized blocks so then I started to think how awesome 4 blocks would look as a baby quilt. Again, completely stash busted and I have a friend who is having a baby in May. I played around with the layout a bit and settled on a diamond shape so I have named it "Around from here". I am thinking that the giant space in the middle needs an extremely cute applique owl (as that is the nursery theme).

Mostly I used scraps but I also cut into some of my precious Heather Ross, Saffron Craig and Laurie Wisbrun, fabrics!

April Showers Mug Rug Blog Hop

Hey - there is a great little hop happening at the moment called April Showers Mug Rug Blog Hop.

 You can find the schedule here and I have been working on something special for my turn on the 17th

C + C Quilt

This is a bit of a crazy quilt - a wedding quilt for friends of a friend. Originally it was going to be similar to the quilt I did for my friends L + P which I did last year - but evolved into something completely different. My friend wanted fabrics to signify their life - so apparently SHE works for the UN and has done lots of humanitarian work in Africa and South America and likes ninjas. HE is Scottish ancestry and works in computers. I will start with the back as I actually completed that first. And so evolved the Nelson Mandela, Scottish Tartan (and yes it is the correct tartan for his clan), ninja and Pacman quilt back.

Instead of a heart like I did in the L + P quilt I did a ninja star made up of 2" colours. 


The front actually took me ages to complete as I had a hard time with the busyness of the fabric my friend had picked. I happened to come across some awesome African mother fabric in a destash group and inspiration evolved! In the end I went for Elizabeth Hartman's Kitchen Window pattern slightly modified as I wanted to fussycut the fabric. I pulled a tonne of other green & black fabrics from my stash as well.


 So very subtly I turned two of the windows into "C"'s.


I also made the centre window into a +. So it became C + C



This is also the first fully freemotioned quilt I have quilted! I used a bit of stippling, wavy lines and kinda a giant star flower in the centre.



all I can say is crazy! My friend loves it so I hope her friends do as well!!

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Nesting {Part 2}

This is a continuation of my previous post of how I doing up the kidlets bedroom on the cheap! Firstly there was the painted chevron rug now we have a dresser and some bunting for Mr Clyde and a new doona cover for Miss Elsie!
The Dresser

This was upcycled from a set of drawers we found on Gumtree. It has been finished for a while (though Clyde was about 6 weeks old when it made it into the room!) Hubby did most of the work, but hey I was heavily pregnant so I have an excuse! He took off a lot of the original trim and sanded it back. We had a bit of a domestic in Bunnings deciding on the paint. The one we originally settled on just didn't work for me after the first coat so I decided on a navy and funky blue drawers. I loved the idea of a painted giraffe, but I have pretty much no artistic talent at all - lucky hubby does!

Bunting 
I got a new toy! 60 degree triangle template!! So I immediately had to use it - perfect for some bunting!



Miss E's new Doona Cover

Her bed is only half painted - we ran out of time before we moved her into the big girl bed. It is the same blue as the Drawers on Clyde's dresser.
Here Doona cover is a mix of fabrics - Chevron, Stripes and Peacocks. The back is lions and chevron.

Still a bit of work to do on their room but it is slowly getting there!

Quilt bloopers

I see a lot of quilty blogs out there about cats sitting on projects - well not all of us are cat people (well I classify myself as a one cat person - gorgeous Ralph who we had growing up - no other cat could compare in awesomeness to that cat - and I even have a cat tat). Anyway I have dogs (Nala and Sierra - but mostly Nala) that like to sit on projects and photobomb pics. Tsk tsk... oh and the occasional child 
Featuring Sierra's behind

Nala admiring

Nala and child wrestling for prominent quilt position

Nala close up

Nala asleep on my wadding

Child wins