Bloggers Quilt Festival

Well it's that time of year again and I love this festival, its so much fun seeing so many amazing quilts. So much inspiration! Thanks so much to Amy for hosting and if you're new here then thanks so much for popping by.
My entry is this baby quilt that my sis and brother in law commissioned for their new nephew. They gave me completely free rein but asked that it reflected them. Well as brother in law is a DJ and sound engineer then I immediately knew it had to be music based so I give you SoundWaves





It measures 30" by 40"
I backed it with flannelette as I'm taking it back to England next week to hand over to my sis and its the start of winter over there so I wanted it to be cosy


I was channeling Dan Rouse for this quilt, I love his unicorn stencil quilt and so I thought I'd go down the reverse appliqué route. I did a layer of HSTs, 2" finished


And then covered them with this lovely bright red. I fmq'd my design over the top and then started cutting away the red to reveal the HSTs


Hopefully it will last long past the baby years!

I will leave you with a few other recent makes in the hope of tempting you back when you've finished checking out all the other quilts











And if like me you like a piped edging then head back next week for a piping tutorial x

Pillow Talk Swap

I'm loving the pillow talk swap, I've watched a few from the sidelines but this time I knew I could make time to join in. The talent over there is amazing!
I pulled some fabrics that I thought my partner would like and I'm pretty sure that this fits their taste perfectly but I'm just not sure I like what I've made with them


Excuse my sticky out tummy!
I like the block and I like the fabrics individually but I'm just not sure about the overall thing! I think it fits my partner but I'm having such a hard time with it, maybe its because if it was for me I'd have chosen more scrappy or more neutral??? I'm just not feeling it. I'm going to try a neutral border but as its already 18" I can't go much larger!
Have you ever made a swap partner something that you're just not sure about or do you scrap it and make something you love?

A not so traditional baby quilt

This is what I'm working on at the moment (among about 100 other things!)


This baby quilt isn't going to be very traditional (its a commission) but hopefully when it's finished it will be a lot less goth. It still has a bit of work in order to transform it into my vision, fingers crossed it works

Getting ready for NayNay

Well I had my 20 week scan last week and all seems to be well thank goodness. Scans in Oz are very different to in England. I was in there for an hour, everything was looked at really thoroughly including my ovaries and kidneys! In England it only ever took about 15 mins. Not that I'm complaining, the NHS is a great service, especially when you leave the UK and realise what it's like to have to pay for everything! Any way enough about that, I'm starting to think about baby sewing for NayNay, now that is not what we will call the baby I promise but its what Lawson has decided to call the baby while its in my tummy (named after his hobby horse!)
We didn't find out the sex, it does seem that in my family you tend to just have children all of the same sex though so its probably a boy, but while I don't know I thought I'd get some girly sewing done as well as some boy stuff and then whichever lot I don't need I can put on Etsy! A genius way of finally sewing some girls things.
So I've started with a couple of quilts obviously. I wanted to do simple but pretty so a couple of + quilts have been started


Red and Aqua



Hot Pink and Lime Green

I actually have lots more important urgent sewing to do so shouldn't really be distracting myself with these! Oh well I'll just sew up the tops then put them to one side for a while, until I whittle down the WIP list a bit.

I've been ruined!

Ruined from being able to sew on any other sewing machine that is! My new Janome Horizon that I won in the Sew Hip Fashion Designer competition has finally arrived at my house and oh boy it is good!


Hairy could not understand why I didn't jump on it straight away, but I had to tidy my sewing room first. I wanted to be in a clean, organised space so I could really enjoy it. Hairy decided that he had to test it out if I wasn't going to!


He was amazed, he played around with some of the pre programmed stitches - helicopters, trucks, cars and flowers!
My stash arrived at the same time so it took me a couple of days to get everything straight. Yesterday I finally sat down for some proper sewing time. Well I can safely say that when I get back to England in 2 weeks for my hol, sewing on my old Janome is going to be a bit disappointing. It doesn't have a knee lever to lift the preset foot! it doesn't have an automatic thread cutter! and it doesn't sew as smoothly! So far I love this machine. I even got up at 7 am this morning to go sew (normally I lay in bed until 8 since being preggers, if the boys allow me to!)
And to finish off with a couple of fabric pics, here's some of my stash looking organised


And a fabric pull for a project I'm planning

DUDQS3 received

Wow I received my doll quilt last week and its totally amazing


It was made my the lovely Leah aka Smoochee (check her out on Flickr) and I'm so in love with it. I'd favourited it as soon as I'd seen it and commented that it would be perfect for my sewing room and then it actually arrived.
In person it looks even more amazing! It measures 16" so the piecing is tiny and perfect.

To make a good thing even better Leah also sent me these gorgeous fabrics, I love them so much


I'm so amazed that someone got my taste so brilliantly

My first EPP

Do you remember my EPP panel I showed you recently? Well I finished it and turned it into a cushion




I took the panel and heavily quilted it with a crosshatch design




Made some piping using mama said sew




And put it all together with mama said sew texty back and a zip








I'm very happy with it, just excuse the chair that really needs reupholstering! Think that's going to be a project for the new year!

How Stupid can I be???

About 2 years ago my MacBook did something random and lost all my photos! Baby photos of Lawson, wedding photos and all sorts of randoms, the whole lot was gone! Thankfully after lots of playing around (and lots of tears!) I recovered them.
Nothing was backed up and we decided we needed an external hard drive to back up onto. I looked around and found a few but didn't know how big to go, how much to spend etc. every so often I thought to myself I must buy one, but did I get round to it? No I did not

And now its happened again but this time it's baby photos of both my boys and my sisters wedding (I'm the only one with photos of that!) and it's looking like they are irretrievably gone!!!

Stupid stupid stupid me! So the moral of the story is just blooming well do it if its something important

My mac is still in the computer shop, I'm still crossing my fingers but not having a laptop at the mo is meaning I'm posting from my phone so may not be as frequent!

4x5 Bee Blocks

Now I think we can safely say that I am not normally very organised and I tend to leave sewing commitments to the last minute but woo and behold I have gone and finished all of my bee blocks already and this round has only just started.
I am indeed feeling pretty smug but it really was just out of necessity, as you know im going back to England in a couple of weeks and though im planning on sewing while im there I need to get my 'must Do's' out of the way.
Admittedly the block I chose was really easy but ive had it in my Flickr favs for a while as I love it, hopefully the lovely other girlies of Hive 4 like it too















There is one block missing, I have made it but managed to delete my photo of it! You can see it in the top pic, rainbow on black, such a striking colour choice

A real doll quilt

We went to a 5th birthday party recently and the birthday girl Abi has a doll that is special to her. We thought her doll needed its own quilt. It had to be pink obviously


Super simple design with some straight line quilting and some hearts. This was my first attempt at no binding on a quilt and i really like the look, think i will do this on sone baby quilts soon.
Luckily I think the pressie went down well

Ironing board covers

I showed you the ironing board cover that I made for my sis but I completely forgot to show you the one I made for myself.




I used darker fabrics as my ironing board covers seem to look dirty really quickly normally, I guess its from sometimes using bondaweb. I want this one staying nice for as long as possible.
Lots of fun Japanese prints used and a mix of cotton and cotton/linen fabrics.








I backed it with cotton and then just put a drawstring in to make it fit and make it easy to take off and wash when needed

Visitors

Yay my sis and her lovely hubby have been over staying with us and it has been lovely but gone far too quickly! will be so sad to see them leave tomorrow but the lucky buggers are off for 2 weeks in Borneo so I doubt they will be too sad to leave us (its only just over 4 weeks until im back in the UK to see them anyway!)
Anyway while they were here I thought I better actually get round to finishing the things that I had started making for them (woohoo more WIPs to cross off the list)
Do you remember this laptop pouch I started eons ago?

And how about this ironing board cover?

Well here they are all complete, handed over and crossed off my list

So pleased with them, would have actually quite liked the ironing board cover to stay with me, some of my fav fabrics are in there and grey and yellow is always good
So to reward myself for finishing some projects, i've taken on some more hahaha just as the WIP list was looking smaller!
I've joined this round of the 4x5 bee, i'm in this round of the Pillow Talk Swap and I've started a couple of baby quilts. Will have lots to show you soon

EPP Travelling PicStitch Bloghop

Ive joined Katy and Lauras travelling bloghop, have you heard of it? Its a great idea. They are off on their travels around Utah, Arizona and Nevada and also going to Sewing Summit, and while they are there they are getting people to link up photos from where they live around the world, and using the photos to inspire some EPP.
Well today is me! Now for those of you that dont know me then hi and welcome to my blog. I moved from the UK to Australia back in March and the reason why I love it so much it because it is truly beautiful. We live at the end of the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, the weather is sadly not amazing all year round but the scenery is. Check these out

Most photos I take do include my children, or their clothes when they have run off to go skinny dipping!
So here is my inspiration photo for my block


And here is my colour pallette

(Sorry I cant get then colour of the photograph to look right on screen)

Now I am new to EPP, I have done hand sewing in other forms (embroidery, hand quilting, finishing garments etc) but this is my first EPP block, ive been wanting to do some for ages but Katy asking me to join in this blog hop was the push I finally needed. Thank you Katy
So I looked around on the web to try to find some shapes I fancied, there were loads of great ones but I couldnt find anything that was like what I had in mind, so I decided to draw it up myself, and this is what I came up with


So I pulled a stack of fabrics, decided Id pulled far too many, narrowed it down to 3 greens, 3 blues, 3 yellows and 4 creams and this was the end result
Now im not sure that this was strictly EPP'd, I hope this doesnt count as cheating but I was going to use glue to keep my paper pieces in place but then realised I didnt have any! So I ended up using the paper pieces to cut my fabrics out then ironed the seam allowance over the edges of them so that I got the exact shape and a nice crisp line, but then (here is the cheating part) I took the paper away and pinned the pieces together and then used a ladder stitch to hand sew them. Do you think that is cheating? Im not sure but I am happy with the result





I will do more but this block will probably go on the front of a cushion, im thinking about using a charcoal background as the beach has lots of charcoal black volcanic rocks and as im using the beach for my inspiration..


Thank you for joining me in my corner of the world today. Tomorrow it is the turn of Danielle at DJ Cool Bear to show us their corner, hope you can check it out and also the lovely sponsors of this bloghop

This post is part of the Travellin' Pic Stitch Blog Hop.  From 1st October - 30th November we are hopping all over the world EPP-ing in some fantastic locations.  Check out the full list here and be sure to check out the other participants.

Thanks Katy and Laura for asking me to join in and hope you enjoy your travels