A good week

Another project finished. This is the little table I posted about a few weeks back it is now beautifully restored to its former beauty with the original marble top all polished and looking fabulous in my Grand Daughter Kaitlyns bedroom to be used as her work table. Just have to retrieve the little chair I gave away to Danielle it will fit with it just right. Sorry Danielle.

Almost 2 years ago (yes 2 years) I sent this quilt pictured here to the quilters. I thought I would never see it again so you can imagine how thrilled I was to get the call to say it was ready and I am so delighted with how it looks. So much quilting maybe she felt a bit guilty and has done an exceptional amount of quilting. Never the less I am happy to have it home and am now anxious to get the binding done.

A close up of the beautiful quilting on one of the blocks

A quick post tonight

The 2 wicker chairs I salvaged from my daughter Danielle's garage destined for the dump now are finished being painted. A few repairs were done to the cane but they now look brand new I am really happy with my effort and am glad that I rescued them.

At least someone enjoys the cosiness of my quilts. Bobbin loves to hide under anything she can find and snuggles in for ages usually we don't know she is there until she moves

Easter Weekend

On the Easter weekend we took my parents down to Victoria to catch up with some family and to visit with our son Joshua who lives at Cribb Point near the Navy base HMAS Cerberus.

It was a lovely trip down firstly stopping at Gunning for morning tea. Lunch at Holbrook then travelling onto Albury for our first overnight stop.

Next Morning we left early and called into Glenrowan where this BIG Ned Kelly was to be found and of course there just has to be the obligitory photo of the family with Ned.

We arrived at our destination Hastings late Friday afternoon. Went to visit Joshua at his unit. On Sunday it was Greg's birthday and Josh had planned a barbeque and had even baked him a cake. He forgot to get candles so Greg had to blow out a lighter. Took a lot of blowing. the lunch was great and the cake was tasty as well.

On the Saturday we went to visit my Dad's sister in law and my cousins that I have not seen in almost 40 years. They have always been great travellers and have lived in lots of different places but have been in Glenn Waverley for the past 20 or so years. It was lovely to visit with them and reminisce about our younger days. My Aunty Connie is almost 91, my Dad is almost 85, my Mum is 83.

This is a family shot from the left; Joshua, Carl, my Mum, Greg, Christine, me, Lynette (Carl's wife) ,my Dad and Aunty Connie.

Before we left on our journey home we went for a drive to Westhead on the Morning Peninsular. It is a beautiful coastline very rugged. We had a great time on our trip to Victoria. Mum and Dad were happy to see Joshua and to visit the Navy base where he is stationed but after such a long trip we were all glad to be home and be able to sleep in our own beds

Works in progress this week

My aim for the next few weeks is to get as many of my WIP's (works in progress) completed.
We have had this little side desk in the garage for a few years now and my Grand daughter Kaitlyn wants it for a desk in her room so my DH filled all the holes and it is now ready to be rubbed back and painted which I hope to get to this weekend.

These two wicker chairs I rescued from my daughter Danielle's garage they were going to be dumped. I have already rubbed them back and they have their first coating of paint. They will look great on my front verhanda. The kids gave their Dad a compressor for his birthday so I think it will come in very handy to spray paint the chairs with the final coat of paint.

I have been working on these Santa blocks for about 3 years now. I have 4 more corner blocks to complete before I can put it together. When I started these blocks I was very keen to get it finished but of course something else just had to be done so these went into the UFO box.

This is the almost finished Mystery quilt I made about a year ago with my Quiting group. Last week I sent it of to have it professionally quilted so that I know it will be completed. I still have many more in the UFO box that have not seen the light of day for quite some time. But I WILL get them all finished one day.

Just this week I have finished this little embroidered pillow for my Mum.
Unfortunatly my Mum has been diagnosed with mild Alzhiemers so a long road ahead for us especially my Dad who is at present finding it a little hard to deal with.
Mum loves pansies and her favourite colours are mauves and greens, I'm sure she will love this little gift. She is 83 and still knitting and doing embroidery herself. I hope she can continue on with her hobbies for as long as she can.

Quilt Camp

Two weeks ago I was counting down the days till Merroo Quilt Camp up at Kurrajong. Now it has come and gone where do the weeks go? Quilt camp was great. I went with 7 friends from my quilting group this was my 8th. year. We leave on Friday and have a wonderful time visiting all the patchwork shops and thrift shops on the way. This year I chose to do a class with Dianne Johnston called Shattered Glass an easy technique for stained glass work. My friend Diana and I chose to call our work "Fractured Fairy" I only managed to get my fairy to the pinned stage by the Sunday but have managed to get some of the stitching done this week. This technique is really easy and can be adapted to original stained glass patterns.

The first photo is my fairy without her wings, the second photo is Dianne Johnstons fairy and how mine will hopefully look one day soon. Beautiful isn't she? Although a bit blurry!!!

At quilt camp on the Saturday night groups are encouraged to put on some entertainment, each year there is a different theme. This year it was Sports, this being the year of the Olympics. Our group decided on the Grand Parade, we all dressed in different sports clothes carried our banner, an Aussy flag and the Olympic rings and marched to the National Anthem I think it was the best of the night we were awarded 2nd. place. It was loads of fun.

From left to right Me, Ann, Helen, Diana Kerrie, Kerry and Barbara.

More Sewing

Again I have been making padfolios for gifts, they are so much fun to make and those that have received one from me just love them they make a very useful gift. The "Shabby Chic" one I have made for my daughter Danielle as she has made me some beautiful jewellery which I just love. Certainly is a great way to use up some of my stash.


I have mentioned before that I do an Arty type class once a month with my friends Barbara and Kerry. Recently we had another trip to Bowral for a class where we were shown how to embroider on our painted paper bag which once scrunched up over and over again, feels very much like a piece of fabric. I call my piece of embroidery "Pattisons Curse at Texas" I had taken a photo on our recent trip so used this as my inspiration. The other piece is called "Passion Pods" I constructed this from a piece of fabric that I had painted, actually started out as toadstools but turned into pods. I machine and hand stitched adding beads and the leaves. This is really not something that I can really get into but have had fun with the classses.

Unfortunatly my photo has turned out a little blurry

A close up of the stitching if you look sideways with head to the left you can just make out the original toadstools.

Not my day......

Well I was going great guns with my blog when suddenly everything just closed down so not knowing too much about computers I just left it too sort things out for itself so I was happy to see that my previous post was saved.

I was at the time trying to upload my next photos so I may have pressed the wrong button !!!!!

Anyhow I will try again .

During the past 2 weeks I have also created a padfolio and a diary cover. The rust and tan padfolio is a birthday gift for my friend Margaret these are her favourite colours. The diary cover was a request from Sheree made in purples her favourite colours of course.

Artsnthemail had a February Challenge to use only a plain coloured fabric and one colour thread to create a postcard. I chose a purple for my fabric and a white thread. After doing some machine stitching I created the 3D flowers and attatched them to my cards. I am very happy with the results.

Been Busy

I have been fairly busy over the past few weeks I really envy all you bloggers who are so diligent in blogging every day. I take so long to add to my blog (not too computer literate) I foget what I am supposed to do and then don't know what to say. My 2 daughters Danielle and Sheree are always having a laugh at me as I am always asking them questions of what to do.

So this blog is for Kylie (a scrapbooking friend of Sheree) an update she asked for when I saw her at the craft show on Saturday.

Firstly I have made 3 sewing machine mats. The bear mat is for me, the floral mat is for my friend Alice who is 84 and still enjoys her sewing and the frog mat I made smaller for my newly aquired Singer Featherweight sewing machine that I have recently purshased in Uralla a small country town whilst on our recent holiday.

Postcards

I belong to a great group of postcard swappers called Artsnthemail. Over the past months I have received some wonderful cards and now that I know how to upload photos by myself (My daughter has always done this for me) I will be able to put up photos of what I receive. These postcards are for Beth, Dawn, Mary & Sharon titled "Valentine - Lace and Roses". I really enjoy doing these little works of art and it is wonderful to hear the comments from the post people some are really interested and some get a little annoyed when asked to hand frank the cards. Our post lady gets a great thrill from my PC's when she is delivering each day once commenting that I must have a lot of friends & family who live overseas.

Happy New Year to Everyone.

I have been away on holidays over the Christmas break Greg and I went on a caravaning holiday travelling out west from Dubbo to the Warrambungles, to Goondawindi travelling on all the back roads seeing lots of little country towns I never knew existed. Next we headed for Texas then onto Tenterfield, Glenn Innes, Tamworth, Glenbaun Dam and then home. Took us 12 days we had a great time and the weather was good to us.

Before Christmas I was involved with 5 other friends in the making of a quilt for our friend Helen for her 60th. Birthday. Helen loves soft colours and traditional so we chose a Log Cabin in pinks and blues. We presented the quilt to Helen at her surprise birthday last Saturday night.

Whilst I was away I made a doll for Helen it is called "Nancy and her Notions" by Debby Magee.

I took my sewing machine just in case I got a little bored and missed my stitching. LOL. It worked well while Greg watched the cricket and I sewed that's togetherness.

I lost this photo in the last post.

This is my 84 year old Dad at the steering wheel of the Standard 10. I think he was having a great time trying to steer this car and I am sure it bought back memories of days gone by.

The Standard 10

My DH Greg has been working on this little car a Standard 10 for about 3 years now.

The time has come for the wee little thing to leave the home comforts of the garage and go to the big workshop to have the more serious mechanical work done so that it can be road registered.

The last photo is Greg getting ready to say goodbye to his little treasure.

These photos are of a huge Sydney Red Gum Tree that was uprooted and blown over in the storm.

Around the area there were hundreds of trees uprooted and it took over a week to do all the clearing away of the debri.

Storm Damage

Sunday 9th December our area and surrounding suburbs were hit by a severe storm. This is the damage done to our back decking area and the white spots in the photo are hail stones.

The storm only lasted about 10 minutes but caused millions of dollars in damage. It was very scarey.

These are a few of the hail stones that came through our verhanda roof and some actually hit our sliding doors.

Our Christmas tree.

This year it was Kaitlyn's job to decorate the tree at first all the decorations were on the bottom as she could not reach the top.

Christmas wallhanging

The group I belong to did this wallhanging as a workshop a few years ago the easiest one I have ever done. All the fabrics were vlisoflexed then cut out in various shapes and ironed to the background.

Very easy peesy.

Christmas at the Power House

We love Christmas at our house... decorations have been up since the lst week of November and everyone who visits enjoys looking around at all the various displays.

This is our Santa collection.

Our collection of Snow people has been growing slowly over the years. Kaitlyn loves these especially the musical decorations.

It usually takes us 2 days to get all the decorations out and in the right places the next day is vacuuming day.

The hanging bears were a Christmas Swap gift with my Patchwork Group The Friendship Quilters.

Our Snow People Collection

The Reindeers

Not many of these in our collection

as yet but give us time. The reindeer with the big red bow I made some time ago from a kit.

The front reindeer was a pattern given to me many years ago and I have since made lots as gifts for friends.

Postcards

These are the postcards I have made for "My Favourite Colour" postcard swap with Artsnthemail an online postcard swap I am in. These cards had to be made using only one colour. I chose to do 4 different coloured cards white, blue, green and purple.

Finally Home

Last week my CQRR finally made its way home after travelling the world and Australia for about 18 months. I am very happy to have it home and am thrilled with all the beautiful hand work of embroidery and embellishments that have been added. I think I will have it framed so it can be admired by all who visit.

Arty Farty Class.

These little items are what I have made recently at my arty farty class I attend once a month with the teacher Barbara and Kerry. We have so much fun even though I don't always utilise the arty experiments we do I enjoy playing with different textures and textiles. The little mermaid was made using hand dyed fabric and beaded. My arty box is of hand made silk paper embellished with wools, threads and beads.

Kaitlyn's Strawberries

A few months ago Kaitlyn was given some strawberry plants from her Poppy. This is a photo of her very first strawberry. She has been waiting impatiently for weeks so was very excited to see the first one. Now she enjoys each one as it is picked.

Another Christmas Stocking

This week I was determined to complete this Christmas stocking for my Grand daughter Kaitlyn. This is the 7th. stocking I have made over the past 3 years and my last for awhile.

Again I have been busy catching up on UFO's. Firstly I have made and finished a Stained Glass wallhanging. I went to a workshop with 2 friends Diana and Ann at Windsor a few months ago. I really enjoyed the workshop and am pleased with my wall hanging although not really my colours.