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!