Recent Creations

here's what i have made over the past week and a bit.  I have decided to have 1 day all to myself and not do any calisthenic stuff at all.  first there's a witchy doll finished....

Then there was a pink towlling teddy...

and then lastly there are some appliques blocks.....



And for something cute - here is one of our cats playing king of the castle..

Knitting over Easter

I found 2 more balls of yarn in the right colour - dye lot is slightly different, but i am not sure I will need them.  If i do I will have to use 2 rows of the original and 2 rows of the new ones to phase in the new dye lot.

My jumper is now in bits and waiting on being remade.

Knitting

We went away over the easter break - had a whole week away in the lovely country town of Bright at the foot of the Victorian Alps.  I was going to take a heap of things to do with me but decided on a cross stitch I have been doing for 2 years now (japanese ladies on a bell pull) and a jumper to knit for myself.  The yarn is think and soft.

The pattern stated I needed 12 balls of yarn, but was short sleeve.  Having already owned 2 short sleeve jumper/tops I decided to make it long sleeve, so I bought 2 more balls of yarn.  I will admit to procrastinating on knitting this as the yarn is $5 per ball - not my usual thing to buy.  Decided to anyway as the yarn is soooo soft.

Imagine my surprise when I got half way thru the back before I had even finished 1 ball of yarn.  Double checked that I read correctly the quantities needed - yep correct.  Then something jumped at me from off the page.  The pattern states that the balls are 50g - guess what, they are actually 100g balls.  So I have bought twice as much as I needed due to incorrect printing!!

Finished my jumper with 5 balls to spare - youngest daughter really liked the colour and is into chunky handknits at the moment.  So she is getting a jumper too.  Luckily she is quite small for an 18yo.

My jumper is a disaster though.  Sleeves are 13cm too long, and there is this horrible puffy sleeve thing happening at the top of them too.  So I have unpicked the sleeves and will frog the yarn to redo them.  The left over can go into daughters jumper.  I may have to try and get 2 more balls just to be on the safe side - I would rather have left overs that be scrounging for yarn to sew it up with.  With left overs you can make a hat.

Quilt for Melb Gang Show

So, after managing to get information from my son about the theme to this years Melbourne Gang Show, I did some research on said theme and found some applique shapes that are pre-cut and ready to attach.  I also found a pattern that looks easy enough to do in the time I have to make a quilt.  I have doctored the pattern slightly to fit my idea of what it should look like.

Next I got hold of a ticket booking form for Gang Show - copied the dragon from it - did I forget to mention it is about a dragon??  I enlarged the dragon onto A3 paper and printed it out.  This gave the basis for the main applique in the centre.

The quilt will look like a number of picture frames hanging in 3 rows, with each row on the same ribbon.  The ribbon goes from the top of the quilt to the bottom of the quilt to anchor them.  There are 4 pictures in the end 2 rows and 3 in the centre row.

So I fused the pre-cut shapes to their background fabrics and then to work on the main dragon.  Once he was fused in place and I started to do the zigzag stitch around him I got to thinking.  Do I really want to donate this to Gang Show for them to do whatever with it?  What if they aren't doing a raffle this year?  The idea was for them to make some money out of it.  If it became a silent auction prize it could sell for way less than what I have paid for it in materials, never mind time.  What to do????

I decided to show my son and talk to him about it.  At this point I beginning to think that I could give it to him - after all he is now a patrol leader for the first time - this would be a sort of congratulatory quilt.

I talked him through the design of it, showed him the pre-cut images all fused down, then showed him the centre piece.  His reaction was amazing.  I forget how many times he said "oh wow!".  But the decision has been made - it's now going to be his.

After sitting there for a couple of weeks now untouched, today I cut the sashing to go around the images - the frames if you will.  Sundays are now officially "JOY" days - days for me to do what ever I like that gives me JOY.  Now all I have to do is convince everyone else in the house of this and to let me be to enJOY them.