Easter creations

I've just spent 6 happy days with my sister and family. They live on a farm about 4 hours drive south of Perth. My kids LOVE going to stay and hang out with their cousins- 4 boys ranging in age from 9.5 months to 8years. With my 3 and her 4 we have 7 bundles of noisiness to contend with. Thats 5 of them above perched on bikes at the summit of "thrill hill". Missing is baby William and my George- who isnt known for being a daredevil.

You wouldnt call my sister 'crafty' in the classic sense (although when the mood takes her she can handle herself behind a sewing machine). Instead my sister arms herself with angle grinders and hammers and stuff and builds really cool stuff like chook pens. When I got to the farm she confidently explained that the 7 cardboard boxes that she had saved from a recent delivery of dining chairs were going to be turned into a cool fort for the kids.

Creative genius (above) is not to be hampered by small children, so they were only allowed to watch on impatiently from the trampoline.
As last 'The Kids Castle' was ready for its occupants.

Very soon, however, the kids turned their attention to creating weapons out of left over cardboard.

And then my sister dug out some red face paint and things just got really silly!

By the evening the castle had been destroyed by over-zealous children and was a messy jumble of flattened boxes. Still it was fun while it lasted!

Six days of no housework wasnt an opportunity I was going to waste, so I took down my scrappy paper hexagon project and completed another two blocks. It doesnt look like much, but dont forget these are all hand pieced.

Here are a couple of my favourite hexagons on the blocks.

Here is a pic of the back showing all those tiny hand-worked whip stitches.

Tin whistle custom slots available

My sewing machines are sitting idle. If you'd like a to order some custom tin whistle items then pop over to the tin whistle store and secure a 'slot'.

Tin whistle- March/April

Tin whistle has had a busy 6 weeks. Over the Christmas break I complied a waiting list of customers interested in having some pram accessories made. By the end of January the list was a teeny bit overwhelming, but I tackled them half a dozen at a time and tried not to think about the list too often. I am pleased to report that I have only one customer now outstanding :) and am now moving over to a new system of doing custom orders. When I am ready to take new orders on I will simply sell "slots" on my online store. At the moment I have them listed as 'coming soon" and as soon as I get back from my Easter holiday I will set them live. So stay tuned if you want a tin whistle custom order


One thing I got to do over the last 6 weeks was revamp my Baby jogger City Select liner. A customer kindly offered to send me the seat fabric for the latest 2011 model (which isn't available in Australia yet) and I used this to design a liner that will fit both the 2010 and 2011 City Select pram.

Here are some pics of this customers pram accessories


As as extra thank you to this customer for letting me use her seat fabrics, I made a couple of co-ordinating quilts for her pram. One in Black polka dot and owl fabric, quilted in a diamond grid pattern;

And one just in polka dot, with all over meander quilting. Both quilts have red/white polka dot binding.

She had the second seat for her City Select pram, so that meant two liners.

Here are a couple of pics of a universal liner order. This one for was a mountain buggy Duo pram (a side by side double pram).

And back to the City Select liner design.

This is also a City Select liner, but its being modelled in my (very well used) Mountain Buggy Urban pram.

And to finish off the month I made some boys shorts up for a friend of mine.

Wowsers- have you got your sunnies on?

I made these "look at me" pants up a few weeks ago for Sara as part of a little mini, personal swap. She gave me this embroidery, and I decided to sew something for her little lad Will in return.

I decided to make Will some pants- choosing something a little bit LOUD, because Sara leans to towards bright and happy fabrics. I knew she (and Will) would either love or hate the fabric, but I decided to take the risk. LOL. I've made this pattern up before and you can see pics here. At the time I thought the pattern was really baggy, a little too baggy for my taste. I guess you may think its weird pattern to choose I don't like when making a gift for someone else. However, the back story is that I had been chatting on the phone to Sara right after I made the first pair and she asked me what I thought because she was thinking about buying the pattern. When I decided to make pants for Will it just seemed natural to choose this pattern so she could see what they looked like. If she didn't like them, at least it wasn't her money, time and energy that had been wasted. Plus I was willing to give the pattern another go, maybe tweaking it a bit to see if I liked it better a second time around.

I picked Echino Nico fabric Buses in green dot, by Kokka fabrics. Its a bit of a risky selection for a boy, but I thought it had the right colour elements for a boy, with a transport theme and was different at the same time.

I really love the way these pants look when you first sew them. They have a flat front panel, and inset pockets. With gentle elastication at the back.

They also have little details like contrast fabrics at the inside waistband and pocket lining.

BUT... they just look terrible on! I'm sorry Pink Figgy, but the fit is terrible :( I made a size 4/5 (George in this pic is exactly 4.5 years and is slightly above average in size for his age). The waistband is way too loose and the pants are obviously too long and also VERY very baggy. These things can be pretty easily rectified, I suppose. ie sewing a size smaller and adding length to the leg. In fact, this is pretty much what I did for Will; I got his measurements from Sara, and picked the size down and added an inch of length to the leg.

Sara reports that Will loves the pants (phew!) and will try and get some pics to me soon.

Would I make these again? I really should learn my lesson, but I am a sucker for flat-fronted pants. I MAY attempt these pants one more time- sewing them in a size 2-3 and adding extra length to the leg. Either that I hunt down a new flat-fronted pants pattern to try.

Bless his little cotton socks

This time last year I had exatly the same problem....ie planning a trip to my sisters farm for easter I realised that the kids didnt have any warm jumpers. Luckily though this time, I managed to squeeze in a quick trip to a fabric store to get nice polar fleece, before I pulled out Kwiksew 3101 and whipped up some jumpers.

I seriously love this pattern. I have all the sizes traced out and its a quick 30 minutes each to churn out each jumper. The resulting jumper isnt 'pretty' but its ever so pratical, and on cold days sometimes you just want function over form.

Georges cute monkey farbic is a current season offering from Textile Traders. Its a gorgeous shade of blue. The yellow stripe knit I had in my stash (thrift store find) went perfectly. Matilda's fleece was also from Textile Traders and I used the same yellow knit stripe.

Elizabeth requested a polkadot fleece jumper... and, blow me down, I walked into Spotlight to be confronted by a brand new bolt of the stuff! I matched it with a red/white stripe knit, also found at Spotlight.

Are you wondering what the title of this blog post has to do with its contents? Today at Kindy George's teacher told me about a class exercise she did with the kids. When asked what he likes about his Mum George responded to the class that, "I like my Mummy because she makes me shorts". Awwwwwwww.

Snapshot Sunday- Another vintage blouse

I made this pattern up into a shirt back in February, see here, and I still love it (although I havent been able to wear it much because of the beautiful Indian summer we have been enjoying). My intention has always been to splash out on some Liberty Lawn and remake the shirt. But then I spotted this gorgeous fabric at Spotlight- on the bargain table too, and decided to save my pennies. This week I have a couple of tin whistle orders to finish off, and then I will take some holidays while the kids are on school holidays. I will be away for a week visiting my sister on her farm and have decided that my hexagon quilt is a perfect holiday project.

Can you guess?

Can you guess what I am up to? I spotted a quilt pattern while browsing the internet the other night and just HAD to immediately buy it.

Does this help you guess? Its my trial run, which I started the next morning using what ever solids I could get my hands on. Its a bit hard to see the overall pattern in a small scale trial run like this.

Ok so here is the pattern! Isnt it fab? I am just picturing it on the couch; grown up, but playful at the same time. I bought the pattern from here. The instructions are well written and the actual block layout is quite straight forward (its just plain blocks alternating with the diagonal stripe blocks). Even a beginner could follow it! But the actual sewing of the diagonal blocks I found quite tricky- they are essentially half-triangle squares, so sewn on the bias... and the blocks themselves are small at 3.75". Maybe I am a dunce but I just found that difficult to piece nicely and they all ended up too small. To make the cot quilt pictured you need over 200 of the diagonal stripe blocks- so its definately a project that would be a labour of love. Once the diagonal blocks, are done however, the quilt comes together very quickly. Here is Matilda holding my mini-quilt so you can get a sense of the scale of the houndstooth pattern.

I am racking my brain thinking of an easier way to piece the diagonal blocks as it makes me hesitate about starting on a bigger version of the quilt. Maybe paper piecing? or sewing lots of strips together and then cutting squares from it 'on point'. Would result in some wastage but would be more accurate I think.