Floating block quilt top

It sure has been a bit of a tumultuous year so far, especially in the last month and time in the craft room has been snatched only here and there.  Sometimes I just haven't even had the energy to go in there which is never a good sign.  But it hasn't all been bad & I've made progress on a few projects over the weeks.

Last week I finished off the top of the floating block quilt I began a while ago (you can see the planning stages here) and today I found the time to snap a shot of it.  I thought initially that the background colour was more than likely going to be a lime-y green, but much umming and ahrring in the fabric shop saw me leaving with a green that is more of a muted mossy sort of shade.

I took this photo looking into the sun, so the stained glass window effect that you see won't last once the batting and backing are added.  The seam lines are very clear in the picture though, so it gives an idea of how I ended up piecing the background to the coloured floating 'windows' to make 6 smaller rectangles that then got sewn into 3 big strips that then were stitched together to give the full finished rectangle quilt top.

Still haven't made up my mind exactly how I'm going to quilt it...like the idea of straight line quilting but not sure if I'll manage to do that without making a dog's breakfast of the whole thing.... watch this space....

Making a jumper into a toddler dress

A nip in the air last week led to a morning of swapping over summer for winter clothes.  Long sleeves and pants out of their boxes and short sleeves and dresses into storage.  A moment of purging overtook me as well & I threw items I'd hung onto for far too long into a pile for the Op Shop.  Then I spied a tutorial on a blog titled make it and love it to turn a jumper into a little wee dress, and before I knew it a number of clothes in the Op Shop pile were back in a pile in my craft room awaiting their moment of upcycling.

I started with one very well worn jumper similar to this one in style (forgot to take a picture of the original jumper in my haste to chop and sew it into a new creation).

And after some simple cutting and sewing this is how it turned out. Pretty pleased.  Best of all no actual measuring required, just some eye-judged snips.  My kind of sewing!

Now we need some of the cold weather back so Little Imp can wear it with some tights.

A handbag gift

One clever Hootchie Lady made me a lovely bag for my birthday last month.

I do like!  The orange fabric is from a dress she wore through both her pregnancies and that she also loaned me to wear through mine.  The beige outer fabric is an op shop table cloth.  Clever indeed!

A work in progress, a floating block quilt

A lovely quilter gave me a pile of material from her 'scrap' bin, including these Amy Butler Midwest Modern pieces which are going to inspire my next quilting project.

I spent a very happy afternoon trawling through all the charm packs I bought last year and pulled squares that go with the 'inspiration' pieces.  I ended up with a pile of aqua/blue tones, olive/lime greens and red/pink/mustardy yellows.  The prints overall have a bit of a retro-ish vibe I think and I do have a bit of a plan for how they will all end up pieced together.

Sticking with the 'modern quilting', as-little-measuring-and-accurate-cutting-not-always-required technique that works for me I sliced into each set of fabrics & then stitched strips together that are each about 12" long.  The plan is to piece these together into blocks and then find a background colour to put them onto....

finished strips randomly stuck up on my 'design wall' awaiting  the next step...

Lucy's Cloche

Little Imp loves her hats.  Most grateful that this means there isn't a constant battle to get her wearing a hat for outside play.  But at times she almost borders on hat-fetish status and there are days when she will insist on wearing all day, inside or out and even to bed!
A while ago a friend gifted me a pattern for Lucy's Cloche from the Olabelhe blog, and yesterday I finally got around to making it.

It was surprisingly easy to put together.  The main problem was the sizing, I realise the fit is supposed to on the baggy size, but my initial attempt was almost large enough for my head rather than Little Imps!  A few fairly easy adjustments solved that though.  The other change I made to the pattern was to just use felt in the brim rather than interfacing.  Will have to see how that wears over time, but at the moment I think it works better - much softer feeling than a heavy inter-facing and felt doesn't crease like some inter-facings tend to.  I also used a plain fabric for the underside of the hat which works nicely to soften the overall look given how bold and bright the outer fabric is.

In the time it takes to clean the house...

How I will remember the Summer of 2012...

My feet are still giving me grief.  Moonboot on all my waking hours for the last 3 weeks while we swelter through heat wave after heatwave.  Euugh!

Trying to stay positive, I can come up with 2.5 good things that have come of this boot wearing.
1. My feet are beautifully soft and smooth - no hard, rough or dry skin here.  Husband says they are softer even than Little Imp's baby bottom!
2. I've hired a house cleaner.  This is the winning point.  She started today and I think she might be here to stay, even after the moon boot is no more.

Oh, and the half point of a good thing goes to Little Imp who has well and truly mastered the words 'shoe' and 'boot', and knows the difference between the two.

Look at what I did this morning in the time it took Cleaning Lady to clean the house.  Both productive ventures with good outcomes, but I know which I prefer!

If only I had the skills...

If only I had the computer skills of my graphic designer brother then composing this new look 'One Little Imp' blog site would not have eaten up most of my day.  You have no idea how many times I re-sized the header image to get it to fit the way I wanted with the text.  Still not 100% happy, but it is not going to be reloaded anymore so this is it.

The weeks drag on where I am stuck in a 'moonboot' on one leg and not supposed to weight bear too much through the other leg while my calcaneal stress fractures take their sweet time to heal.  My heels just aren't healing (ha!).  Very frustrating indeed.  As much as I enjoy crafting, there is only so much you can do before you run out of something you need, or just want the option of doing something a bit more energetic....