I love red and white polkadots. Lucky for me you can see them everywhere at the shops right now. My kids just roll their eyes when I point out yet another cute cofee mug, mouse pad or pair of socks in red polkadots! Oh well at least they wont have any trouble shopping for my birthday.
To finish off the quilt top for Jills japanese quilt (again) but George had a request for a monster he saw in a magazine. He only took about half an hour to make, but then the beautiful weather called and I never got around to me other sewing plans.
I love to sew with knits, and have lots of success, but I avoid at all costs having to hem the garment. I've tried lots of different methods and stitches but a simple hem will always come apart (through over stretching) and generally just looks a bit crappy (note to self: save up for a coverstitch machine! For this top I just cut 3/4" strips of knit and stitched them around the edge using a wide zig zag. It curls over and and results in quite a nice 'boho' layer-y kind of look.
So that was t-shirt #1 out of the way. I was happy with the over all fit etc so started again on some new fabric.
Tshirt #2 was constructed out of a bright yellow stripe knit (it was gifted to me in someone else's de-stash a couple of years ago). This shirt has slightly deeper scoop and I made the sleeves shorter. This time I finished the raw edges with regular old ribbing. I used red rib and cut it a scant 1" wide (so by the time it is doubled over and stitched on only about 1/3" is visible)
I love this one and call it my Twistie t-shirt. LOL.
#3 shirt used up some cute red polkadot knit (spotlight? last year?). I used the same pattern as before but scooped out the neck even more and left off the sleeves all together. I also cut it off shorter at the waist and added a really wide ribbed waistband. The neck and arms holes were also bound with red ribbing.
The singlet didn't work out quite how I imagined it, but looking at these pictures with fresh eyes I don't really mind it. I think it looks a bit 'vestish' and perhaps I will actually get more wear out of it next winter with a long sleeve shirt underneath!
For tshirt #3 I really started to get carried away with my own variations. This one is made out of some brown knit (gifted along with the stripey yellow stuff). My original intention was to do a sedate kind of gypsy tunic... but i dunno I just cant seem to help myself with it comes to bright fabrics! I cut the bodice at a high waist and then just added a 'skirt'. The skirt was a wide tube of fabric gathered to fit the smaller bodice opening. When I stitched it on I also snuck in a 1/2" strip of the yellow stripe. The neck and arm edges were finished in the same way as #1 shirt, with 1" strips of the brown knit stitched on with a zig zag stitch. The bottom hem was finished with 1.5" strips of the yellow stripe random folded into pleats as I stitched it down.
I'm not really sure about this brown gypsy tunic. It looks 'ok' in the pictures and 'meh; in real life. I guess it's the one that is the least flattering and looks the most home made. I might end up ripping off the pleats at the bottom and just leave it as a raw edge maybe that will take away the home made look.
For shirt #5 I went back to basics and cut it out of black stella. I used 1.5" grey marle ribbing to bind the neck (so about 1/2" strip is visible). For the waistband I flicked the overlocker to rolled hem stitch and did a lettuce leaf edging. I cut 2.5" off the sleeve length but then added it back on again with really wide grey marle ribbing (cut 5" wide"). I also added 3 buttons to the sleeve edge just for a little bit of interest.
I like this one and being black I know it will get lots of use. 
Full BabyJogger City Select pack, including liner, stowable blanket, quilted (reversible!) bassinet sheet. I think I also made a matching bassinet blanket out of the left over fabric, but forgot to photograph it.
City Select damask liner pair.
I LOVE this one. Its a pair of liners with matching stowable blankets. The customer chose fabric with white stars on it, a navy background for one side of the liner/blanket and red background for the other. I'm not sure if you can make it out, but I quilted the blankets with star motifs.
Various City Select liners
And I finished off this one last week. A liner/blanket set using fabric supplied by the customer.
Lazy Sunday going on here! I was playing around with the blocks for the Giant japanese quilt. Now I am blogging an emailing. After this I will get this kids out of the house and ride our bikes to the river for an ice cream (well, I will walk.... they can ride) 
And today---->
This weekend I have been busy unpicking the japanese quilt top and cutting up the new fat quarters.
I last blogged about this quilt here. I popped around to my Parents place and tried out the quilt top on the bed and decided it needed a 10" border around the entire thing to give it a nice generous drape over the edge of the bed. Since then Jill and I have been waiting for a spare moment to pop back to Sanshi and get some more co-ordinating fabric for the 10" borders. When we got there we discovered they are closing down :( Most of their fabric is sold out.. and definitely no continuous yardage anymore. After a quick think I decided there were two options (1) go elsewhere and find a solid (in black? grey?) colour for the border or get as much extra fabric from Sanshi as we could and make extra blocks and add another row to the quilt.
Jill decided against the solid border idea, so we rummaged amongst the remaining selection of fat quarters and fabric remnants and found about 8 or 9 that already appear in the quilt or co-ordinate nicely. Ultimately, I think the quilt will actually look better having the extra size made up from blocks rather than a border... but I'm pretty sure this means I am going to have to unpick the entire quilt and re stitch it. The new fabric will need to be scattered amongst the existing blocks to give it a balanced look. So its a disaster... but not really as the quilt will end up being the better for it.
In the mean time, I've started sewing Matilda's aqua pop quilt.
I've snaffled this little portable towel rail from the bathroom and I am using it to store the completed rows. It makes my half-done quilt look like a piece of art rather than a half done quilt!
We went up to the supermarket and local green grocer and sourced 9 varieties of potatoes. Lots of them were really common sorts (Nadine, Ruby Red, Kipfler) but we stumbled across a couple of really unusual ones, like the Tasmanian Purple Congo's.
We cut up the chips (uniform sizes for this experiment... normally I am not so particular) and put them on to baking trays. I helped Matilda arrange them into different orientations so that we could tell them apart once they were cooked.
BTW... here is how I cook my fabulous best ever chips. Wedge them, put them on a tray and then drizzle olive oil on them and sprinkle them with salt. Put them in the oven... about 160-170 deg Celsius for 1-1.5 hours.
The cooked chips were then sorted into bowls according to their variety. At this point the different varieties were assigned a letter rather than given their proper name. I kept a list of the letter that had been assigned to each potato variety.
We had guests over for dinner and this meant we were lucky enough to have 7 people scoring the different chips. Matilda created a survey form, which listed the different potatoes (by their letter, not their real name) and tasters had to sample each chip and give it a score out of 5 for 3 different categories; colour, taste and crunch. The 3 scores were added to give a Total Score for each chip. Using the total scores the tasters were then asked to list their top three chips.
What we discovered was that 5 of the 7 taste testers ranked Ruby Lou as their #1 chip! (Matilda was right!).
