2014 Reading Challenge - 5 from Forever

 

Rachel has thrown down a new reading challenge for the new year. This time it is about all those books you want to read 'someday', that have been on your list 'forever'. Pick 5 of them and read them.

Simple.

My 2014 Reading Challenge list:

1. On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, 1859
2. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852
3. 1984 by George Orwell, 1950
4. Utopia by Thomas More, 1516
5. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, 1947

 

All of them are classic and they are often referenced and quoted but it is impossible to talk intelligently about them if you have never read them.

 

A beautiful illustrated edition of On the Origin of Species is sitting right beside me as I type. I've started reading it but anticipate that it will be some time before it is finished.

 

Get more details on the challenge on the Little WhiteDove blog and you can also have a nosey at what everyone else has on their 'Forever' list.

KTB - Chinook Scarf

Project: Chinook Scarf
Started: July 2011
Completed: 28 Dec 2013
Gifted: January 2014


Sometimes you start a project to learn a new skill and when the results are less than spectacular you shelve it and move on to something else. Sometimes you have even finished it and it just needs a little bit of special treatment to bring it up to standard but you aren't quite sure how to do it, so into the UFO pile it goes.

This was my first lace knitting project and it was complete apart from weaving in the ends, but I was unhappy with it and shoved it away while I decided what to do with it. I had pretty much made up my mind to unravel it and use the yarn for something else but my sister-in-law (a fabulous knitter) convinced me to block it first to see if it opened up the lace pattern.

Wow! So glad I did. Washing and blocking softened up the yarn, opened up the lace and really made a difference to this scarf. I loved it!

The pattern is a Ravelry  download - the Chinook Scarf by Ali Green. I used Sean Sheep 'Stirling' 100% wool from Big W and the colour is called Madeira Rose. After blocking it measured 172cm by 39cm (at the widest point), long enough to wear as a scarf or as a shawlette over the shoulders. The lace pattern was simple enough and the knitting was fairly quick. I'd make this one again.

I have very little need for warm, pretty scarves and shawls here in Queensland so I packed it up and sent it off to a different sister-in-law in New Zealand. It arrived in the second week of January - just in time for a big dump of snow and ridiculously low temperatures right in the middle of summer.

 It feels so good to complete something and to be happy with the result. Makes me want to go cast on a new project - but I won't. ;)

2014 Kick the Bucket WIP Challenge

AJ is hosting another challenge to help encourage us to clear out the stash and finish off some of those projects that have been cluttering up the craft room and our minds for far too long.

Follow this link 2014 Kick the Bucket WIP Challenge to find out the details, join the linky and maybe finish some of your own works-in-progress that haven't progressed far enough.



I've got a WIP list inside my crafty cupboard that I wrote out a few years ago that has sadly increased in length instead of encouraging project completion. Rather than wasting time doing it again I thought I would make my list of just a few projects I really want to complete this year.


My 2014 Bucket List:

1. Batik Quilt. This has been in progress for years and I am really looking forward to getting it on a bed.

2. Drop-stitch scarf. Started sometime last year, so not an old one, but I'm past the halfway mark and I'm really looking forward to blocking it and seeing how it turns out.

3. Lady Kina cardigan. Well over a year-in-progress, and over the half-way mark. I love the colour of this yarn and really want this off the needles and in the wardrobe.

So those are my three must-do for the year and if I get all three completed I will be very happy!
I do have plenty of others, and I've even completed two long-standing WIPs in the last few weeks.
Such a good feeling to complete something - hopefully I can do it far more frequently this year.

December 2013 - Christmas Canvas Swap

One of the girls in my quilting group inspired several of us to begin collecting art supplies and do a bit of dabbling with multi-media art. We have formed a little off-shoot group (like any of us really need more hobbies!) and catch up every few weeks for some messy art play.

We had our first canvas swap - mostly as a way to get some of us to actually create something with all those supplies we have been accumulating. It was a Christmas themed canvas lucky-dip swap and we ended up with six people participating. Here they all are, lined up for the swap. It is amazing how different they all are.

I got to take home the lovely little Shepherd Canvas made by Rachel. If you click on that link you can go straight to her blog post and read about the thought behind this artwork, and also see a much better photo. He came home with me and took up residence on our mantelpiece among the Christmas decorations until the start of January. He has now moved into my sewing room where he is waiting patiently for his own space on the wall. Jack was very taken with it, running his fingers over it and wanting to know how Rachel made the shepherd stand out from the background - there is a lot of texture in this piece. In the end he decided 'she must be a shepherd-maker' and we settled down to have a bit of fun making up stories about what happened to the sheep.

I made the purple ballerina. She was going to be an angel or Christmas fairy, but the idea sort of morphed into this as I worked on it.
I love the background. I used scrunched up glad wrap over wet acrylic paint to get some depth and movement. I also used purple and silver Inka Gold paint, Perfect Pearls silver metallic powder and Opal Dust iridescent glitter paint to get lots of glimmer happening.
The star is made from moulding paste applied through a stencil and then coloured with silver Viva Inka Gold metallic beeswax-based paint. It is highlighted with plastic gems in shades of purple.
The girl is collaged onto the canvas. Her outfit was made in several layers using scrapbook paper and scrunched tissue paper.
The lettering was traced onto tissue paper and then decoupaged onto the canvas, traced with silver paint pen and then outlined with black ink.


 This was a fun swap and I think everyone enjoyed pushing their boundaries and seeing where it took them. Hopefully there will be more arty swaps in the future.

August 2013 - Bookweek Alien

August brings Book Week and that means dress-up time.This year's theme was 'Reading across the Universe' and the kids were encouraged to come to school dressed either in a space theme or as a favourite book character.

  Jack wanted to be an alien so we dug through the book shelves looking for alien books and found 'My Brilliant Book' which has three-eyed-aliens who attack earth.

 

We had an inflatable alien head and hand set in the cupboard, bought on sale some time ago with the thought it would come in handy sometime. As luck would have it the head was a three-eyed-alien.

 

We needed a body so used a tracksuit pattern to draft up a one-piece jumpsuit with back opening, similar to a skeleton costume he already had, and went shopping for some fantastic shiny green dance fabric.

 

I did the work on the costume while Jack was asleep - bad idea, as was the idea of joining a tracksuit top and bottom pattern together to draft a jumpsuit. I should have traced the costume he already had and just made it bigger. Instead I did something wrong and ended up with a jumpsuit that was far to narrow and far too long in the body.

To salvage it I shortened the sides and added width by adding a shaped insert to each side seam from just below the underarm to the hip, gathering the side seams to fit. Jack thought they were gills and apparently gills are awesome. I added a row of gathering along the centre seam from front neckline through the crotch to the back neckline, and then stitched the gathers in place. It worked but the gathers didn't hold in place very well and a strip of elastic would have been better.

 

Jack thought he was super cool and had a great day, even though several people thought he was a frog. As a bonus he got to wear the same costume to a Space dress-up night at Scouts two weeks later and won a prize. 

November 2013 - Butterfly Spring Quilt from Alissa

 

 

Here is the awesome little quilt I received from Alissa in the Spring Doll Quilt Swap. I love it!

 

Alissa made me a fantastic tree quilt a few years ago and they are keeping each other company and adding some bright colour to my sewing room wall.

 



November 2013 - Spring Chickens

 The annual Doll Quilt swap nearly didn't happen this year. Thankfully someone suggest a stress-free option: no partners, no requests, a theme, a minimum and maximum size, a four-month time frame and a due date. If you send one in, you get one back.

The theme was 'Spring' and there was some major Pinterest action going on. My favourite pin was a quilt depicting 'springs' - of the bouncy kind - in a lovely garden setting.

As usual, I dithered, trying to make a decision about what to make. I was leaning towards a star in 30s fabrics but I had already done that. Finally I remembered a Margaret Rolfe quilt book that I had always wanted to make something from.

 
I flicked through and found the chook blocks and decided on a design - Spring Chickens. I wasn't too worried about the design not being everyone's cup of tea as this group of girls have an ongoing in-joke about chooks, with an ever-growing and somewhat quirky collection that circulates the country. Someone would appreciate a chook quilt.
 I drafted out the blocks during one of my quilt group meetings then traced them onto freezer paper that I picked up at the last craft fair - very handy!

The freezer paper is awesome for this type of quilt. You cut the templates apart along the lines, iron them to the fabric, draw seam allowances directly on the fabric, cut the fabric apart and then sew the templates together using the edge of the freezer paper template as your seam line.

As long as you mark everything and refer to your diagram as you go it works (almost) perfectly.

The final layout wasn't decided until I had finished all the blocks. It was originally going to be a more traditional doll quilt layout with hen and two chicks at the top and the rooster and two chicks below, but playing around I though this layout could do double duty as a table runner and wall hanging. At this point I was worried about not finishing it on time, and decided if I ended up keeping it then it would fit perfectly on the dresser inside our front door.

 

This was made totally from stash. The black and white fabrics were from a birthday swap years ago and that 'barcode stripe' was exactly perfect for the binding which used up most of a fat quarter. The green was a fat quarter from one of my earliest quilting fabric orders and there was just enough of it to border around the blocks with only tiny scraps left from a full fat quarter. The red, yellow and browns were from a 'scrap pack' I purchased long ago - really handy for this type of project. The backing was another fat quarter that had been floating around forever.

All up I used just under a meter of fabric for the whole quilt.

 

I quilted about 1/8 to 1/4 in around each of the chooks and then quilted straight diagonal lines in the background. I was planning to quilt back the other way to make a diamond pattern but got this far and thought any more would be too much.

 

As usual I cut it pretty fine to get it finished - I was hand stitching the binding down and tying off quilting threads at my quilt group meeting on the day it was due to be assigned to its recipient, racing against the clock as I had a plane to catch!

 

Thankfully it was finished with minutes to spare and was sent off to Catherine, who lives on a farm surrounded by hundreds of chooks - perfect quilt for her!