Baby Quilts

The first quilt I ever made was a baby quilt that my Mum and I made together a couple of years ago for Lilly's pregnant pre-primary teacher.  

We cut out a bunch of squares of cotton, taped them all to bits of card and snuck them in to the classroom on a day we knew Mrs Stent wasn't going to be there.  Each child in the class was given a square to draw a picture for her and the baby using fabric markers (the kind you iron to set). 

I must say it turned out rather well considering Mum and I had never made a quilt before.  I quilted it by stitching in the ditch, and backed with some lovely bright rainbow fabric.

 

We naturally couldn't give it to her without some quality control testing, so here is Gen giving it her seal of approval.

I have also made a rag quilt for Geni's bed, made completely from stuff that I had already.  Although technically some of it was fabric that my Mum had already, but she let me steal it :P

 

It's two layers of flannel with a square of bamboo batting sandwiched in the middle.  The back of the quilt is all red.  For some reason I had 5m of red flannel... I honestly can't remember why I bought that much of it, undoubtedly it was going to be something good though! :P 

This is how it looked when I put it on her bed, almost like I planned the colours.  I love when that happens!

 

And this is the quilt I just finished the other day for my brand new baby niece Sophia.

It's a stacked coins baby quilt, I used a jelly roll that I got from Spotlight and supplemented it with a couple of other fabrics I had in my stash.  I now know that it is a stupid idea to prewash precut fabric.  It all shrank to different widths and I didn't want to trim them all so I just went with it and ended up with stacks that didn't line up perfectly.  But it turned out okay in the end!

 

The back is pink/brown/white stripes with a pieced strip.

  

I quilted it with wonky line stitching that is between 1/4" and 1/2" apart.  I was going to teach myself to free motion quilt for it, but I didn't get around to practising so I went with lines :P

Next time I'll get rid of peg marks before I take photos!

 My sewing machine was being naughty while I was quilting.  I changed the needle and fiddled with the tension to no avail, so there are quite a few skipped stitches in the quilting.. I'm hoping nobody looks close enough to notice :P

Bags and Things

I've really been able to sew a lot more since we bought a bigger house last year.  I now have a designated sewing area so instead of having to drag the machine out to the kitchen table and have it all packed up again before dinner it's always there, ready to go, so as a result, there have been many hand made gifts from me this year!

This is a drawing bag I made for a little boy who was turning 2.  It was inspired by a monster art tote I saw on Craftster.   The inspiration was a square bag, but I decided I wanted it to be big enough for standard colouring books, so I used to extra space to add his name with felt.

Geni modelling the bag before we gave it to Dukey

Gen was rather taken with Duke's bag so I decided to make one for her too.  She's not much of a monster kind of girl, so I put a teddy on hers.

It was my first time using fusible webbing to applique the name on.

Next up is a paperback book cover I made for my cousin.  I read a few of tutorials and then made up my own pattern after measuring a bunch of my own books.

 

   

One of these days I'll get around to making one for myself too!

I also made a liner for my stroller, with the intention of making a few different ones, but haven't gotten around to that yet (she'll probably be too big for a stroller by the time I do).  I found a stroller liner tutorial on the net, but instead of following their instructions exactly I made my own pattern by tracing around the liner that came with the pram.

 

I also made some fabric gift baskets for the girls teachers for Christmas last year using a tutorial I found on the net somewhere.  The first two were for their ballet teachers

There is a little organza bag full of choccies in there, and a facewasher reindeer, and a porcelain christmas ornament that they decorated using my porcelaine pens.

The next two were for their class room teachers.

They had pretty much the same thing in them, with a candy cane reindeer instead of a facewasher.

Next up are the laptop bags I made for the girls.  We gave them little netbooks for Christmas so I read a bunch of tutorials and then combined elements from a few different ones to make these little bags. They are made from heavy weight Ikea fabric and lined with red cotton, with bamboo quilt batting sandwiched in between for a bit of protective padding.

Caitie's Bag

Oops apparently I forgot to rotate this image file.. ah well.. do me a favour and just turn your head to the side a bit :P

Lilly's Bag

Then we come to Easter.  I made each girl a fabric basket with their initial on the front.  They've all used their basket for different purposes since Easter.  Caitie keeps her DS and MP3 player etc in hers.  Gen's one holds all of her cloth food from Ikea, and Lilly uses hers as a teddy bed.

 

I didn't have a lot of luck finding dairy free easter eggs for Lilly this year so to minimise the amount of chocolate she was getting I made these little egg pouches out of felt (you can probably find which tutorial I followed if you google it).  In them I put a few bits and bobs in there.. like a little stamp and some stickers and a pencil etc.

 They were so easy I ended up making a few more for other kids that we were going to see on the day.


 This bag was a birthday gift for a 9 year old girls birthday.  I made a buttercup bag, and a zippered pouch (that I put a couple of dollars in) and we bought her some sunglasses, so I made a pouch for those.  And I also made a rainbow headband and some ribbon hair clips.

The buttercup bag is so cute and easy, I plan on making myself a slightly larger one at some point.

Geeky things that I have made

First up is a Companion Cube that I made for my husbands 30th birthday last year.

I pondered how I wanted to construct it for a while, and then decided it would be easiest to just cover an existing cube with nerdiness.  So I went out and bought a Feet Seat, and then set to work.

I used polar fleece because it's stretchy and doesn't fray.  There are 6 panels, each heart and corner piece are lightly padded with hobby fill.

 

     

The following photo was taken before it had a base or rear panel.  I was finishing it the night before his birthday and ran out of the cotton so had to give it to him as it was.

 I couldn't find a long enough zip, so I ended up using two zips that meet in one corner on the base so I can take the cover off to wash it.  One of these days I will take a photo of the finished cube.  We've only been putting our feet on it for over a year!


Next up is this question mark cushion I made for a friend of ours for his 30th birthday.. lots of little 1.5" squares sewn together.  And then quilted by stitching in the ditch around the main elements.

 

And I also made a Zelda cushion for another friends 30th birthday

 

 

Nothing says 30 years old like a nerdy cushion right?

And then there were my Lemmings, made from Ikea melty beads.  I had to improvise some colours in the chute and their home because there wasn't enough variety in the jar, (I had to use purple for grey etc.)  but you can't really tell from a distance!

 

They're never going to make it :P

And this is the Hearthstone cushion I made for my hubby for his birthday this year.  My youngest no longer naps during the day so the criteria was quick, easy and suitably nerdy.

I think that covers all the nerdy things I have made in the last couple of years!

Welcome.. to the FUTURE

Hey look I found my old blog full of ancient wisdom.  I shall update it!

Everything after this post is from 5 years ago or more :P

Ninja's

I now know how people turn into Ninja's.

Caitie just explained it all to me.

Apparently they are people that used to be dead, but are alive now, and they look like turtles.

You're Fired!

Earlier this morning the girls were playing trains. At some point during the game Caitie growled at Lilly to make her scream, so I told Caitie it's not nice for train drivers to growl at their passengers and when she asked why, I told her it was because they'll get fired.

Now they are playing something completely different (they're doing puzzles), and I just heard Lilly growl at Caitie, and then I heard Caitie yell "YOU'RE FIRED!"

Home Alone.

Have you ever left a 2 year old child locked inside a house alone? No?... me either *coughs* technically she wasn't so much locked in, as I was locked OUT.

Caitie had been riding her bike in the backyard, and I thought she might be thirsty so I went out there to ask her if she would like a drink. As I headed back towards the door I heard a click, then Lilly jiggled the handle around a bit and said "Mummy! Door locked!"

I gave the door handle a bit of a jiggle and came to the same conclusion.

"Unlock it!" she demanded. Unfortunately that was a bit tricky for me since the key was on the inside, with her. Too high for her to reach of course, since we wouldn't want her to be able to get her hands on it and lose it would we? If she could have reached it this story would probably be a lot shorter, I could have gotten her to slide the key under the door to me, then I could have unlocked the door and come inside. The End.

The real story went a little bit more like this.. "Lilly the silver one.. the shiny one.. the SHINY one!!" "Look Lilly turn it like this" *Mummy makes a turning motion in the air* "See Lilly, do that on the shiny bit!" *Lilly makes a turning motion in the air* "No Lilly, turn the shiny bit!" *Lilly pulls on the handle as hard as she can* "Like this?" "No Lilly, click the little silver bit, push it over to the side!" *Lilly tries to turn the lock, but pushes it in the wrong direction* "No, Lilly the OTHER way!" "Oh RIGHT!!" *Lilly pulls on the handle some more*

Now I'm not sure exactly how long this went on, but Play School had only been on for a short time when I went out there, and it was almost finished by the time we got back in. So at least 15 minutes, maybe more.

I'm just glad she didn't wander off! I think the fact that Mummy kept giggling made her think that it was a fun new game. Although I doubt that I would have still been giggling if she hadn't eventually managed to unlock it again. If I'd been stuck sitting in the backyard for almost 2 hours, while she was inside alone waiting for Jase to get home I suspect it wouldn't have been quite as funny anymore!

From now on I am taking the key with me EVERY time I go outside.

If only we had a doggy door.