Before and After

Before: a 99 cent tea towel from Savers.
Don't you love the colour and those polka dots? I'm obsessed with this lime green.

After: a new tote bag for me. Materials other than the tea towel were from my stash - interfacing, thread, one long and one short zipper, lime green with white polka dots lining fabric, scrap of batting. I winged the pattern, using the shape of the tea towel to dictate the dimensions. It's basically a rectangle with the two bottom corners sewn at right angles to form the base of the bag. There is one large zippered pocket inside (handy for keys and the mobile, which always sink to the bottom otherwise), and another pocket on the other side with an open top. I put a scrap of quilt batting into the handles to make it more comfortable on my shoulder. I even shortened the long zipper to make it fit the opening (a process I've only tried once before with limited success, but it worked well this time. Voila, custom sized zipper). The sewing in of the zip in the top is a bit wonky, but it works!

I needed a new tote to carry my sewing project to work, and this fits the bill.

I'd show you a photo of the lovely spotted interior with my custom zipper, but the camera's memory card is refusing to give up the photo, despite me turning the air blue with swearing and jamming the card in and out of the reader about ten times. Pooh!

Beep beep, reverse

Drawing 404

Drawing 405

Reverse of Drawing 405

When I turned this drawing over, the bleed through from the front of the page caught my eye and set me wondering: what if I drew something like this on the front just to get that effect on the back, and then drew over the bleed? Or added to it on the back? Hmmm. Pondering...

Drawing 406

In my head

Drawing 403

I woke up with this image in my head, pretty much as she appears on the page. Don't think I was dreaming her, but who knows?

Head and tails

Drawing 398

Drawing 399

Drawing 400

Drawing 401

Drawing 402

I think that when I crack 500 drawings I'm going to get myself a treat :)

Champagne? A great big steak with all the trimmings? A new pair of shoes? A ginormous
canvas to play with? Hmmm...

More, more, more...

Drawing 393

Drawing 394

Drawing 395

Drawing 396

Drawing 397

A selection

Drawing 388

Drawing 389

Drawing 390

Drawing 391

Drawing 392

Halloween Hexes

This is the quilt I've put together WHILE AT WORK. I sew during the quiet times, and it really is this quiet. It's all halloween fabric with orange centres and green spacers. Spiders and skeletons, ghosts and ghoulies, witches and cats, pumpkins and skulls, candy corn and owls. Cute! Single bed size, hand pieced. Four more pumpkins to go along the bottom, six half-pumpkins to even out the top and bottom rows, then I might do a row of black ones all the way around and bind it with either the orange to match the centres or green to match the spacers. Or maybe a bit of both :)

I may even go the whole hog and hand quilt it with perle cotton. Orange? Green? Black? Decisions, decisions...

Obsessed

Drawing 383

Drawing 384

Drawing 385

Drawing 386

Drawing 387

Back to the faces. Can't seem to shake them. My pencil just wants to draw 'em, constantly. One day I'll move on!

Faces and fancies

Drawing 378

Drawing 379

Drawing 380

Drawing 381

Drawing 382

Pile o' pumpkins

During the quiet moments (er, hours) at work (once I've dusted, tidied the fat quarters, tidied the shelves, dealt with any deliveries, and while there aren't any customers) I've been doing some handwork. The pile above (matchbox for scale) is what I've achieved. I've been using up a bunch of Halloween scraps, with the addition of some Halloween fat quarters and a little yardage. I LOVE Halloween stuff, so I have a bit of a collection (okay, maybe three large ziploc bags!). I'm using the English paper piecing method, making hexagons. The central hexagon is orange, the surrounding six hexes either random scraps or six in the same fabric. The pile of pumpkins (even though this a kind of grandmother's flower garden pattern, I can't call them flowers - so they're pumpkins) numbers 46, all completed at work. I did cut papers at home, in front of the tv.

I've started sewing the pumpkins together with a variety of lime green hexagons as spacers, and the little quilt is turning into a fair sized quilt very quickly! I'm always amazed at how fast this pattern goes together once I start sewing the preassembled units to each other. If the smoke in
the sky from the horrendous Victorian bushfires ever clears and the bloodred sun returns to normal, I'll take a photo of progress so far. The light outside is not conducive to photography.

I'm very lucky that's the biggest of my problems.

Another ketchup

Drawing 373

Drawing 374

Drawing 375

Drawing 376

Drawing 377

Hmm, long time, no blog. Again. The longer the hiatus, the harder I find it to make a blog entry. But I still want to post my drawings-a-day, so here I am, back at the coalface :)

Not much happening, still working at the quilt shop, which is very VERY quiet at the moment.
So quiet that...well, see next post.