I Love Big Books and I Cannot Lie.... oh, and Chairs too...

...These two beauties arrived in the post this morn via the lovely amazon.com. 

Modern Patchwork by Elizabeth Hartman

and

The Shape Workshop for Quilters by the Fat Quarterly Team.

Cant wait to delve in to them and will never get there if I keep faffing about on this bloody machine!

And you may have been admiring the fabric in the background?! 

Here are the chairs I thrifted off the side of the road during our last summer in Australia, which were a cat-damaged, floral abomination! Thanks to my wonderfully creative friend, lovely Lisa at Vintage Influence who organized her upholsterer, her dad Al who touched up the wooden bits, and the extremely talented gals at Ink and Spindle who custom printed the fabric for me, I think they turned out fabulicious!

And here is the another one, that Lisa picked up off the side of the road and re-gifted to me! It now lives in Charlie's room, covered with red Echino cars and is a lovely comfy reading chair. Thanks once again to both Lisa and Al for all their help!!!

When I went over to Lisa's to pick up the chairs, I fell truly, madly, deeply in love with this old Singer sewing table that Al and Lisa had restored with a beautiful Blackwood top. Had to be mine! Here its is with my 'Girls' by in pride of place.

I have even more gorgeous things to blog about tomorrow...watch this space!

T x

Slow and Sew

Finally I have a cold enough day to light the fire. 

A fire at night is lovely, but there's nothing like that smell of your dinner slowly cooking on top of the fireplace all day!

 Lamb and Lentil soup / stew 

The latest quilting bee is another Quilt Around the World. 

We each make a starter block and send it on to the next person, who adds to it and send it on to the next etc, etc. 

There are 24 recipients so I should end up with 24 blocks of a similar theme.

Here is my Lone Star starter block. 

Biartch of a thing to put together but what a great result!

t X

Au Naturalle

I've got a cleaning frenzy happening but thought I'd take a break and blog about this quilt I made recently for a 21st on commission.

The mum sent me 21 photos and I printed them onto printable fabric.

She wanted natural colours and I had quite a few in my stash so only had to purchase the backing, really. Spotlight's new Cotton Lawn (cheap version of Liberty) is really lovely but a Bucking Fitch to sew as it's slippery as forty b**tards!

There's a nice mix of textures with linens and cottons of various thickness. I even used a tea towel from Ikea! (new, not used and manky)

I free motion quilted it in swirls and flowers.

She has Returned!

Hellloooo there! 

(This photo shamelessly stolen from my cousin, Stephen!)

Thought it was about time I started with the bloggy love again seeing it's been nearly three months since we made the big move back from Melbourne to NZ!

Can I just tell you that life is great?!

The kids are settled in school and I L.O.V.E that it's a little country school where life is a bit simpler and a love of community is instilled in them in all facets of school life, from the areas of study to the whole school activities. A big shout out to Oropi School! We love you!

They've also embraced the all-emcompassing love that most New Zealanders have for the game of Rugby. I am struggling to love the early morning games on Saturday in the cold and damp, but better get used to it!

I am doing a course and have a student ID!

 Jas is travelling a bit to and from Aus but hopefully that will settle down soon.

Soon this will be our view every morning (minus the orange digger!) What's not to like?! The beast of all retaining walls has gone up and hopefully we should be ready to build the actual house by the end of the year!

That's all for this installment. Sniff and I have just started another Around the World Quilting Bee so will get the sewing mojo back in full force soon

Tanya X