Skewed not sewed!

I've come to the conclusion that I really do suffer from skewed thinking. It comes in handy, but it holds me up and serves to distract me when it comes to finishing a project.

Skewed thinking means I can justify anything if I put my mind to it.

However, Friday's skewed thinking kind of really took the cake...............

I was in the throes of basting the flannel quilt to the wadding, I thought to myself " I need pins", in fact what I really thought was "This is taking way longer than I thought it would, I'm starting to get bored, I need to implement an avoidance technique - I need pins".

So after very very carefully removing all the papers from the quilt, I decided to reward myself with a trip to the local patchwork shop to buy pins (skewed thinking alert number one - I have a bloody cupboard full of pins. To use a "house that Jack built" analogy, I have so many pins, I could feed a dairy farm the size of China with all the haystacks I would need to hide aforementioned pins in). In any case, I decided pins were needed. In fact these pins.

I have to confess to never having used quilters safety pins and I wish I'd known about these before now.

So there I was at the counter, waiting for the women to finish serving the other customers. I had the pins in my hand, determined not to look at anything else. At this point, the dialogue in my head (between 'Sensible Thinker Me' and 'Skewed Thinker Me') went something like this.

Sensible Me: "OK that's it! You don't need anything else, don't look at any fabric."
Skewed Me: "But the women behind the counter are going to be AGES you might as well have a look around the fabric section"
Sensible me: "No, you have enough, you know you'll just buy something you don't need"
Skewed Me: "You mean something you don't need YET, what if you don't look and you miss out on something you might need further down the track (I told you I was really skewed) - besides it's just plain lazy to be standing here when you could be burning random calories by walking around the shop"
Sensible Me: "Are you listening to me? You don't need anything"
Skewed Me: "Back in a tick - I'm just going to look over there"
Sensible Me: " nooooooooooooooooo"
And that's how I came home with this!


This olive green and grey range caught my eye a few months ago and has really niggled at me since. I love it. It's pretty without being too feminine and I think it will look fantastic with my pins!

Very little progress on the flannel quilt. The back and front are both patchworked so I'm taking my time with the placement on the wadding to make sure they are aligned properly. I have to say the new quilting pins have been a godsend. I have never used them before as I've always hand basted the layers together..........

See I really DID NEED those pins!

Liberty Quilt

I've wanted to make a quilt from Liberty fabric for a long long time. I had a picture in my head of a quilt made up of squares using a variety of prints and colours and the idea was to arrange them in colour waves. Given the cost of Liberty fabric, I realised that it was going to be too expensive so I put it into the 'dreams are free' category and just went about my stashing business.

Then, during one of my random ebay trawls I came upon these! (well when I say random I was typing "Liberty Fabric" into the Ebay search engine under 'quilting' fabric on a daily basis, so I guess I was bound to come up with something sooner or later!)

They are 4" squares and they are perfect for the quilt design I have in my head.I have about 400 of them all up, so it will make a decent size quilt- about 180cm square. I figure if I'm going to do it, I may as well end up with a quilt that's a good size.

Have no idea where I will find the time, but the inspiration is there! (hmmm can you buy extra quilting time on Ebay?)

Scraps and naughty acts with the good scissors

One of the local patchwork shops has a scrap basket. They sell the scraps for $1 a pop. Every time I go in there I have a bit of a forage around in the basket and usually manage to come away with something. So far I've came away with these. I think they are leftover from classes that they run at the shop and women leave them there rather than take them home. It kind of strikes me as odd that you would do that as a quilter - but each to their own. However I'm glad they do, and I wish I wish more patchwork shops would gerry onto this notion of having a scrap basket............ hmmmmmmmmmm.

The initial plan is to use some of these in Mum and Granma's quilt. I figure they are scraps from SOMEONE'S quilt, so it's kind of in keeping with what they intended. But looking at what I've got so far, I wonder if I could just make a quilt top out of the scraps.

Melbourne is trialling the 2am lockout at nightclubs over the next few months. The other half is suggesting that the patchwork shops instigate a similar approach with me. Well not exactly similar -he's just hoping they may lock me out permanently!!!!

It's a long weekend here and we had lunch with my niece and her family yesterday. My 9 year old great niece embarked on series of 'trivia questions' over lunch (or that's what she called it - interrogation would be a more apt term). The "TQ's" basically revolved around the behavioural traits of myself and my siblings (one of whom is her Grandad). Questions like "what was the worst thing you ever did?" " Who was the naughtiest in your family?" "What was the naughtiest thing Grandad ever did?" ** I may or may not have told her that Granpa had stolen a police car when he was young and nearly had to go to jail. Not true, but I saw an opportunity and went for it.
Where's this going? I hear you ask - Well, I struggled to come up with an appropriate response to the question 'what was the naughtiest thing you ever did?". When I say struggled, it's not for want of examples of naughty behaviour - Ha! there is an abundance of those. I just needed to exercise some editorial discretion given my audience was a 9 year old and mentally absorbent 4 year old.
I pondered this question on the way home and it wasn't long before I had my answer. My cousin came over last night and we went through a big box of old photo's and stuff that had come from my grandparents. And that's when I found these.


These were sent by my grandfather to my great Aunt Rae when he was serving in France during World War 1. They were some of mum's cherished posessions.

The one on the top is hand embroidered silk organza and it was a fabric post card intended to store little snap shots. It used to have a little embroidered sleeve on the top. That is, until some busy little fingers took to it with some scissors. The aim was to use the top sleeve as a hat for dolly.

The one underneath used to be attached (apparently) to a beautiful silk card. Hmmmm not sure what I'd intended for that, but I took to that with the scissors as well.

So, while it's not a hangable offence, I still have awful guilty cringey moments when I come across them. I know Mum wanted to 'crown' me when she'd discovered what I'd done to her postcards, but I guess that's the risk you run when you teach your little one's early how to use the good scissors!
I think I might put them out on view, maybe as a reminder of my heinous past and because they are still beautiful.

Finish your peas and carrots!

This is what happens when I'm left unsupervised and I have the urge to get behind the wheel (or as the case may be, the pedal on the janome). I've had these charm squares lolling around the cupboard for a short time and they've just been daring me to start another project.The range is called Pea's and Carrots.

They came in a pack from Ebay . (don't you just love the way I make it sound as though I just came home from work and there they were!)

I had a night at home and I hadn't actually done much on the sewing machine for a while so I thought I'd give this a burl. I didn't put a great deal of thought into the placement. I really just grabbed the pieces randomly and stitched them up. I plan on bordering it with an orange print from the same range and then find a stripe for the backing. Not sure what I will bind it with, but it will depend on the backing I guess. In any case I excused myself from the sewing table before I finished my peas and carrots and I fully intend on returning to finish them off, but for the moment I've got other stuff on my plate that needs to be pushed around with the fork and buried under the mashed potatoes before I can give this any further thought.