Another small quilt

I 'angelika-ed ' all the scraps from my log cabin wall hanging (backed, basted, not yet quilted) to ,ake this little cot quilt.  I really wish that I'd run a strip of white between the six blocks and the outer blue border pieces, but it's all finished now, so too late to worry about it! 

When I am making these little quilts with the scraps I'm dealing much more with trying to use the bits that I've got left / cut than I am thinking about the design, and perhaps I should be trying to do both.  Still, at approx 24" x 36" it's enough to keep a baby cosy (or clean - I always used small quilts under my DD's when they were babies - it either kept clean floors clean if my girl was a bit grubby or dribbly, or kept my girls away from floors that I thought were too dirty to want them rolling around on!).  Mind you, when the girls were older they were also taught that the quilt could be their space - whenever I went to my cranial osteopath (and that's at least once every three weeks, sometimes more frequently) she was charmed that from a very early age the girls knew to stay on the quilt.  They could read, play, snack, whatever they liked - so long as they stayed on the quilt.  Hard for DD1 who has a roaming instinct and an interest in everything, but acceptable as a working rule for all of us!

Enough of the reminiscing.  Time to actually start quilting that log cabin, perhaps!

More cake!

That's it!  The last birthday cake that I shall make until March 2013!  DD2 was pleased with her honey pot cake on Thursday, and for once I managed to exceed her expectations.  She says that she guessed that her real birthday cake would be a honey pot design, but she thought that it would be a picture on an ordinary cake.......  Always nice to make small (or not so small, she's now seven, crikey!) children happy.

Now a bit more voucher counting for school, a little papercrafting (I've become slightly book making obsessed and want to finish the two that I've been making today for the girls, using spare photos from a couple of years ago), and then I'll be back to sewing again.

Hope that you are having a fun crafty time too!

Cake Engineering

 

I am thinking that it's not really cake engineering, but icing engineering.  I also think that I will never be a Brunel in the engineering world ;-( 

The cake was a basic rectangle with one cut (and a lot of icing to cover it!), but the bridge was more of a challenge, and was nearly as over-sized as the tree, which you can just spot toppling out of the photo!  I bought the characters for DD2's birthday party cake, and could have used Playmobil trees and a bridge, but decided to try and make my own.  As a Winnie the Pooh cake I thought that it hit the mark.

DD2 (who was temporarily known as Tigger) seemed pleased with it, and pleased with the shot glasses of condensed milk (Pooh's favourite snack, for those who have forgotten childhood adventures with the AA Milne character) that we passed around during the party tea.  Hard to believe that my littlest one will be seven this week!

I'm sure that it won't be a surprise that I don't have any sewing to show again, although I have started hand sewing another little book - this time made from used colour catchers, and it will have some wadding to stiffen it slightly once the hand stitching is finished. 

Happy crafting, everyone!

Not so much sewing!

No sewing to show this week (the wall hanging that I worked on last week still isn't finished, as I've been recovering from half term / getting ready for DD2' birthday party) but I did use some of my sitting down time to actually finish my current C&G module.

This photo is the last bit of an exercise where I'd taken a small section of a photo (in this case where the roof and two walls of a slate hut met), make a paper study of it, then cut up the paper study and do a little something extra with it.  I cut along the lines of the architecture, then added 'fastening strips' between the sections.  Fun to make, but I don't know how I can easily store it without either taking up lots of space or squashing folds into the fasteners.  Oh well, it can have a couple of days of glory on my work table before being consigned to the flattened reality of shelf-living!

Book and bits and bobs

 Inspired by this post by Tina Rose, I doubled up some ordinary Vilene and made a little book as the final piece for my current C&G module.  The module has had two aspects - texture and landscape.  I decided that my little display book should be quite simple, but take a journey from bright / shiny / smooth (the front cover under the rippled silver is a smooth silver foil sheet)

 to dark / matt / rough.  I used heat textured food packaging (and hot glued on dragees), frayed cotton, printing (my own stamps, supposed to be gulls and limpets), decorated papers and applied threads, stencilling (my take on an Andy Goldsworthy rain shadow) before finishing with seaweed and an urchin made from old school tights and some heat textured postal packaging.  I'm quite chuffed with it as a representation of some of the things that I'd been playing with in my sketchbook.

 There has been a little bit of sewing - mostly sample blocks.  This is homemade bias binding which actually gave a much lighter and more modern look to the heart shape than I was expecting.  Perhaps the bias was narrower than I thought that I could make!

 Here is a paper study from a photo of a flower bed. Again using home decorated paper, and this time using different weights of paper curls as well as a 'push up' tree.

Finally the little 'rain shadow' men in my garden.  I didn't manage to make one of myself, but thought that it would be fun to make paper doll ones instead.  If you are interested and want to know what I'm referring to, do an image search on 'Andy Goldsworthy rain shadow' and you'll understand. Completely temporary art, recorded only with a camera - and something that makes me smile whenever I think of it.

Whether you are sewing, crafting or just storing up ideas, I hope that you are having fun this week.