New project!

Found it! I think this is THE perfect project if you want something portable or, as in my situation, something that can stay UNPACKED untill the very last moment and even be taken into the carry-on luggage in the airplane :-) flying us back home.
Blogging around I found the blog of a lady called Jessica that started this quilt-along. Have a look at her blog here. She started a Flickr group where all the ladies taking part in the quilt along upload photo's of their progress. Have a look here. So after this find, I started to get organised to take off on this project. I happen to have a perfect little folder to put everything in (Thanks Annemarie,!! Remember the Vichi-free-samples-folder you gave me a few years ago?)

All the plastic diamond templates, fabric diamonds, needles, thread, threadcutter etcetera fits in there snuggly!

I have decided to make a quilt with scrappy-stars. So each star will be made up out of 6 different fabric diamonds. I have cut the plastic templates out of No-Melt Mylar Template Plastic. I cut 6 60dgr diamonds out of all my left-over fabrics or not yet used fabrics. I intended not to buy any new fabrics since we're moving soon but as you can imagine that didn't go as planned ;-).

The way to go is: you lay a plastic template on the fabric diamond, fold over the sides. Slide over a paperclip for temporarly fixation (in the photo I used a hairpin because I couldn't find paperclips at that moment :-) ). With a needle and some thread you stitch the corners so they're attached. You'll end up with the diamonds on the bottom of the photo above.

After quite some fabric cutting and even a few diamonds folded & stitched, this is what I had.

When you have 6 diamonds folded&stitched, you'll hand-stitch them together and make them into a star.

And tataaaa! My first star! WOHOO!

To seperate the stars, there will be white diamonds in between.

And this is how they will fit into each other. It's actually quite addictive! Once you've started forming a star, you want to see it finished. And one that fits in there and so on.... Myrthe and Brent like to join in by arranging different diamonds into stars. I love it when they do that and have to think of a way to remember who 'made' which star. For now I've written their initial on the back but that will be covered up when I put on the backing. Mmmmmmmm.... If you have an idea!

My friends Jo, Ilse & Narelle kindly donated the fabrics in the photo underneath when they saw me working on this. How great is that!! Thanks heaps girls! Greatly appreciated.

It will be such a valuable memory having pieces of their fabrics in this quilt!

This is how far I have got for now. I have 1 1/2 more stars ready to go in my folder (so need to go buy 3 more fabrics to finish off that 1/2 star ;-) ), then I have used each fabric once. 5 more pieces of each fabric to go!

This (photo above plus the 1 1/2 star to come) is what I call 'the 1st set'. Now I am preparing 'set 2', which means doing the folding&stitching around the templates. Set 2 will be 1 diamond of each fabric as well but then differently arranged. And so on with set 3, 4, 5 and 6 in the end. Make sure you'll keep posted to see how I go!

Craft night at Jo's.

Last Thursday night we had a craft night at my friend Jo's house. This was organised because another friend Deb was visiting Karratha after being away for quite a while. We used to craft together before so couldn't miss out on the opportunaty to craft togehter again.
With the 4 of us (Lorraine entered in the joy as well), we had a great creative night.
Jo was making a crad for her being part of the designteam at Do You Stack Up. Lorraine and Deb tried copic colouring after Jo filled them in on the do's and don'ts. I did some sewing and made this lovely pincushion following Jo's directions.
I love the shape and how easy it is to make. It only takes you 2 pieces of 5 inch squares fabric, a bit of ribbon and a button.
At the moment I am trying to get organised for the move back home. And since I also need to pack all my craft stuff, I needed a small project to work on in between all of this.. . . .
I will fill you in on what I'm working on soon.

Almost done...

In between all other projects this one is still going. The rag quilt for my little girl. This week I finally put together all the squares & rows. Looking great, don't you think?
Normally you stitch and cut around the outer border like you did with the edges of the squares but I decided I prefer a proper border/binding. So went online and ordered some more fabric from the same range. It was quite hard because the range is sold out almost everywhere or just little bits left. Luckely I did find a shop that still had enough left.
I am in LOVE with this fabric. It really brightens the day. Then I started doing some maths to work out how wide the stripes should be to make the desired border (Yes, I know I should have done that before I ordered but thank goodness I ordered enough!!). I cut all the strips and am busy sewing them around the quilt. (Photo's of this will follow!) All that's left when I finished the border is cutting/clipping all the seams in the quilt. This makes the seams soft and fluffy. This is a picture of the seams before clipping.
And this is how it looks after a few hundred cuts. Very cuddly!!

I'm very glad I bought the special rag quilt scissors from Fiskars which make clipping the seams soooooo much easier. Hope you like it!

Quick project on the side.

Today I went to the second hand shop to try to find some glitter-fabric piece of clothing which I could turn into a circus-outfit for my daughter who's invited for a circus-themed birthdayparty this weekend. A friend gave me this advice since our craft shop is quite expensive. Well, I found a really great short black dress with gold glitter, perfect size for the circus-dance lady she wants to be, bargain prize $1, woohoo! I also found this little red shirt with airplanes and I remembered my son still has a (boring) red top waiting for some applique.
Luckely on the back of the shirt there were 2 complete airplanes, because all the ones on the front are missing the tail of front, which I didn't notice untill I was home, lesson learned here! (I think I can unpick the pocket and use the one underneath later). I used iron-on Vliesofix on the wrong side of the fabric and cut out the 2 airplanes. (for some weird reason this photo keeps turning on it's side ?!?!).

I ironed them on the front of the red top so they won't shift while I sew them on. (you can still see the change of colour from the heat of the iron, it changes back after cooling down!).

I used a blanket stitch on my sewing machine to sew them on.

And a happy, chappy little bloke!

And yes, my little girl was over the moon with her circus dress!