Project journal: 15.04.14

It's slow times around here on the project front, I'm afraid. I feel like this year, work-wise, just hasn't even officially started. Despite having an extra day and a half a week to work, I think there have only been one or two weeks that I've been able to actually use all that time for work stuff. I either desperately need groceries or to do some kind of errand or there's some school activity that I want to check out (swimming, assembly, Easter parade, etc). So anyways, this trend will continue for the next few weeks as we just added THIS sweet face to our family:

Meet Pepper, our new dachshund moodle (Maltese/poodle) cross puppy. Pepper who is the sweetest little pea of a doggie but can't bear to be left alone for very long and must be within sight of me all the live long day (and a few times each night). So I've been getting not too much sleep and although today is one of my only work days during these school holidays, I'm camped out on the couch listening to the Feist and Ben Gibbard station on Pandora and getting some internet stuff done (including this miraculous and overdue blog post!) while puppers sleeps on her blanket beside me. I don't trust her amidst the chaos of my sewing room and I'm missing getting in there to do printing and sewing (even though my BRAND NEW and EXPENSIVE sewing machine had to be sent back to Janome for some super annoying sensor error so I'll have to use my old machine if I do manage to snag some time). I'm working on training Pepper to be alone for a little bit of time here and there so hopefully it won't be too long before I can get some good chunks of work time back in on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

In the meantime I'm working on a couple of new designs and making plans for the Craft & Quilt Fair which is only 10 short weeks away (sounds like a long time until you realise that is only 20 official working days for me... 20 official working days that I'll also be taking care of a puppy...). I'm scheming all sorts of new fabric goodies and waiting for some time to actually produce them!

Project journal: 05.04.14

Um, where did March go? Two weeks of everyday swimming at school for the five year old, a couple of Saturdays teaching, four weeks of my porcelain course and a head cold/flu for the past two weeks made the month completely fly. Luckily I did take a few photos so I can catch up with my project record:




I finished the custom single sized quilt I was working on and have since received beautiful photos of a gorgeous one year old girl snuggled up with it in it's new home - the best reward for creating, I think. OH! I was just about to talk about the quilting and I realised I haven't even shared the news here that I bought the new sewing machine that I was coveting!!


I got a Janome Horizon 8900QCP and it is soooooooooo lovely. I can't believe the difference when quilting, it's really so much easier. And it comes with fun new stitches like this wave stitch used on my latest quilt, the picture below shows it really well.



So that was a bit of fun for my busy March days. I also made some custom oobees who went off to their new homes and had way too much fun creating porcelain vessels and beads in the workshop I was taking with Abby Seymour (about half of the goodies I created shown here):




And I did a whole lot of teaching with a great Freeform Patchwork workshop at Handmaker's Factory:


A full day of Stamp Carving and Freeform Patchwork at the super amazing Treehouse Textiles (they have the most fantastic studio space, I highly recommend experiencing it!):


And I just did a great day of Stamp Carving and Freeform Patchwork with some wonderful members of the Melbourne Modern Quilt Guild, who produced some amazing work and were great, great fun! For some crazy reason I did not take a single photo of the Freeform Patchwork creations (I'm blaming coming down from my head cold meds) but you can find some taken by other members at their Flick site:


Whew, okay, I think thats me all caught up on projects. I'm just starting a couple of new things right now, will share them this week, along with some fun news of the puppy variety. Yes, I said puppy :)