Sail riggers bag

I joined a group called OPAM, one project a month to try and get some projects finished in 2011. Whilst my rainbow quilt is almost finished, it has been taken away to be judged for our group's 20 challenge. Even though it isn't finished to my satisfaction, it still looked very striking.

So having joined OPAM last Friday, it came as a shock that we had to finish a project in January. So I grabbed my bag of goodies bought at Queen Anne's Lace in Kissimmee which consisted of a pattern for the sail rigger's bag by Ev SPires Designs, fabric and iron on wadding which was new to me. I finished the bag today having bought some velcro in town this morning to finish off the project. I made one mistake by adding wadding to the inside pockets but I'm happy with how they turned out and I haven't added a solid base to the inside of the bag as I didn't feel it needed one.




I am pleased with how the bag has turned out and may well offer it as a class through CQ. I have also listed all of my projects in progress and found one or two which I had completely forgotten about which brings the total to about 12 including two projects I am just collecting patterns and fabric for at the moment. I found a simple baby throw in tuquoise and pink in the cupboard, which will probably be the next thing to be attacked as it just needs binding which I can hand stitch at Chez Soi on Wednesday. Then back to my rainbow quilt when it's returned on Wednesday. I need to finish it in time for March's Eisteddfod.

Colour advice wanted please

I am working on finishing a quilt over the next 10 days for a group challenge. The challenge due date has been postponed twice. I only found out it had been postponed again last week as there weren't many ladies at the Christmas lunch in December. I had been ill for 10 days so had stopped working on the piece and couldn't go to the meal either. The theme is 20 and including the backing there are 20 different fabrics in my quilt.

This quilt was the product of a workshop run by Caesarea Quilters with visiting American tutor Jan Kretz amidst all of the problems caused by the ash cloud. This an example of the quilt pattern we were following Quick Split Broken Star

Later in the year we had another tutor, Philippa Naylor, who taught us some fabulous machine quilting including freehand feathers which I am using all over my quilt. I've done them in the centre star points in a primary variegated thread.



I've done the freehand feathers in the outer star border in the same thread.

Around the outer border I've used a red and black variegated thread in circles and have already added the red and black binding.




Now to the part where I need help. I want to do some feathered wreaths in the squares surrounding my inner star and my first decision is which thread to use? I have the sand colour which is grey and pale yellow, on the right of the photo or I have the pastel colours on the left of the photo? I want to be able to see the pattern I've quilted without it dominating the bold colours. Opinions please on which colour thread to choose.

It's worse than I thought

On the unclutterer blog the writer suggests working on one area for improvement for a month rather than having New Year's resolutions. Good idea I thought (even though we're already half way through January), so let's tackle my scrapbooking first.

So this morning, I had a 9.30am appointment at Education and had a little bit of time to start on this area so I thought I would pull out all the layouts I've made which need to be filed into albums. This is the result. Eek. Some embellishments have come off a couple of pages so when filing them I'll also have to put some back together. First job is to sort them into piles by category. There's at least 18 inches of layouts in those two piles but I don't think I have any stashed elsewhere.




Two other aspects I need to address this month are doing more scrapbooking and I'm meeting up with Joanne tomorrow night to scrapbook - good idea Joanne and also tidying my craft room, but I think I'll start with my filing first.

Celebration segway

Another crop layout finished on Saturday using an Allison Davis sketch and the making memories postage stamp paper I'd challenged everyone to use. I think Liz won the prize for using every scrap of paper on at least three pages.



There's a new two page sketch ready to download from Allison's new website

Today's crop

A lot of ladies were suffering from colds and flu so we were only eight today, but had great fun teasing everyone who won more than one prize, even though it was inevitable with twice as many prizes as attendees. Not big value prizes but they are still appreciated.

I brought my small amount of US stash which was admired. The grab bags Joanne and I purchased were from this website http://www.queenandco.com/ It was a sale item and only to the US. The cost was $20 including shipping. I was just looking at their website and the rhinstones are $1.29 and we probably have 10 packs of rhinestones each. Felt borders are the same price and we have about a dozen so the rest was free.

I finished one double page and two singles at the crop. A second double layout is half done and will probably be finished at the next crop!! The mad hatter layout used a blueprint for January 2011 from the Scrapagogo website. www.scrapagogo.co.uk This was one of the items I had loaded on my Ipad and then left it at home with my crop kits. Thank you Nick for coming to my rescue.


A Scrapagogo class kit which is nothing like the original but I pinched some stuff off JOanne and a stapler from Liz and it went together nicely.I sanded the woodgrain coredinations paper and it looked so good, Tracey sanded some she had too with flowers on and it looked great.

Ipad heaven

We're back from our Florida holiday to a cold house, but it's starting to warm up thankfully. I popped down to Radio Jersey this morning to talk about WI and in particular promote Sirens WI. Then it was off to the Co-op for a few provisions, though our basics were delivered yesterday by Valley Foods. I'm enjoying using their service. Order before 11.30am and it's delivered the same day. Wednesdays seem to be their slower day and they often have a free bottle of wine on offer for Wednesday deliveries. Unfortunately we ran out of washing powder after only one load of post holidya washing, but I ordered some from Valley Foods with some other stuff and it should be here later today.




Whilst in Florida I treated myself to an Ipad so I've been slowly getting to grips with it. I am so chuffed that I managed to load some sketches into my Itunes library, synced the ipad and then by choosing PFDs under the collections button I can see the pdfs and take them along to crops without printing them out. I just need to find someone who has the first three Ali Davis downloadable sketches saved to their computer as they have now been archived at scribd.