Tin whistle Feb 09

I have been making lots and lots of Tin whistle Tiger shorts this month. Every pair is a little bit different. The ones pictured here range from size 6 down to size 1. I have so much fun putting together the combinations of fabrics. I often find that boy fabrics dont make good shorts as they end up looking too much like PJ bottoms. This method of combining various fabrics into stripes before making the shorts means you get to use your boy fabrics and still end up with a cool pair of duds.

Plus some explorer shorts (these have the detachable pouch)

Size 1 shorty dungaree's in blue cord with Very Hungry Caterpillar spots

Pram liner and hood in cowboy theme.

For chelsea

I made this for my friends little girl, Chelsea, who turned 5 yesterday.

I made my own buttons to match the dress.

My friend also ordered some dungaree's for her niece. These are made with a stripe from the Farmers Market range.

British-india disappearing-nine-patch

Thats my little nickname for this quilt... the fabric (Moda Symphony) has traditional english prints but in rich, muted colours. All I need is a gin and tonic and a cricket game and I'm set.

At the moment its spread out over the sewing room in several piles.


First I have 9 stacks of charms (in a carefully sorted "random" arrangement). There are 320 squares. These are all on a large book so I can move it out of the way when I need to get on with other sewing.
When ever I get a chance I take one square from each stack and sew it into a "nine-patch" block and chuck it on the sewing table.



Every so often I stand and press the seams and add the block to the completed nine-patch pile

Then when I need a change from sewing AND ironing I stand at the cutting board and slice the nine-patches into four disappearing-nine-patch blocks

And add the four diseappearing blocks to the pile

The final layout of the D9P blocks will be something like this. The quilt is to be queen size, so Iwill have 60x84 D9P blocks with a 10" border all the way around. Thats if I dont change my mind along the way!

In other news, I am participating in a "charm swap" with some online quilting buddies. There are 11 of us and the idea is that we each send the other 10 members 10 charms in their chosen colour scheme. The aim is to use as much of your own stash when putting together the charm packs, so that for the cost of $5 postage (and maybe a little bit of fabric) you receive 100 charm squares in a colour scheme you like. I picked "Brights" as my colour scheme and am of a mind to somehow use them as a basis for a single bed sized quilt for Matilda. Not sure what the design will be yet, but tonight I thought I would have a little play with some left over charm squares.

I sewed some of the charms into 2 nine-patch blocks intending to see what they looked like as D9P blocks

But changed my mind and went for a crazy patch block instead. You stack your blocks on top of each other (I only had 2 but more would be better) and then slice randomly through them. The you jumble up the large pieces and join them back up with one of the smaller piecesto reform a square block. (obviously because I only had 2 blocks to start with I took the bottom larger piece and stitched it to the top smaller piece).

I sliced and rejoined about half a dozen times. The edges of the squares ended up being a bit jagged so I trimmed them off so that the crazy-blocks were 12" square

I have to say crazy/scrappy quilts give me the warm fuzzies, so I would love a complete quilt from crazy-sliced squares, but since it is for Matilda I will have to let her have the final say-so on whether I can keep slicing up bright charm sqaures.

Maverick stars

I am hooking into the bushfire quilt project being run by Tia of Camp Follower Bags. The aim is to make one or two quilt blocks and send them to Tia who will make them up into quilts and then send them on to vitcims of the recent Victorian bushfires. Tia suggested using this maverick stars tutorial to make the required 12.5" blocks, which is great because I have always wanted to do some foundation piecing but was too scared... the maverick stars tute is a nice baby steps introduction to it.

Here is attempt number one- it worked out well except that it was 6.5" square instead of 12.5". OOOPs!

Attempt #2 was much better, although I didnt read the bit where Tia said that the stars should be on a light coloured background. Ooops again.
Now there is one thing you have probably noticed in this blog... and that is an absence of light coloured fabrics. So after a little run up to the fabric store where I bought myself 1m of the stuff I was ready to make some stars to send off to Tia.

Edited to add some pics of the completed blocks

And just as a little aside, here is what I did with the first little maverick square. I turned it into a pocket and built this size 4 dress around it.

Tin whistle back in full swing

I'll start off the year by posting a couple of pics some of last years customers sent in to me over the christmas break. I am not sure if i am allowed to post names so lets just say that the little miss in the first photo is wearing a pair of size 2 Denim dungaree's and
this slightly older little miss is wearing a cupcake skirt that she picked out from my stall at the East Fremantle festival last December (I remember her well because her mum was trying to talk her into another skirt but she really wanted this one).

I have also started on my customer order work and these two items were completed and sent out in the last week or two.

Universal liner with matching hang bag (michael miller Iota squares?)

The reverse side of the above liner (hot pink corduroy)

A bugaboo cameleon hood teamed up with a universal liner. The outer fabric is black cord, the inner is timeless treasures boho chic

I am aware that there are probably some patient people out there waiting for me to take on some of their customer order requests. I did say that I was intending start doing more in early Feb, but in the mean time have felt obliged to take on an order or two amongst family and friends (normally they take the back burner to my online requests). This means I cannot take on any 'online' orders for another week or so. I would also really like to hold a stall at the upcoming Mathilda market... but I am not sure if I am going to manage to sew up enough items in the next month to do the covercharge justice.