Galentine's Gifts

As fans of Parks and Rec, staunch feminists, supportive friends, and proponents of any excuse for merriment; my girlfriends and I celebrate "Galentine's Day" on a semi-regular basis. Apart from being a lovely occasion to spend time with some of my favourite people, it's also an excellent vaccination against imposter syndrome.

For the latest Galentine's Day I decided to channel my inner Leslie Knope by making some hand crafted gifts for my gals that suit their personal brand of awesomeness. I'll attempt to explain how each gift is customised to their recipient, but in the interest of my friends' privacy I'll refrain from gushing too much. ;)

The first gift I made was a purple quilted cushion featuring a pieced fox for my friend Jessie.

She is sweet, thoughtful, affectionate, and playful; the IRL incarnation of Deanna Troi. She has a plush fox that she loves to cuddle, and purple is one of her (many) favourite colours. I happen to know that this gift has also received many cuddles from it's new owner!

I put together the fox block based on Elizabeth Hartman's Fancy Fox Quilt, and I used some of my favourite Lizzy House fabrics from her 1001 Peeps collection (2011): Purple Pearl Bracelet on the border, Purple Scheherazade for the flap on the back, and Orange Scheherazade for that foxy little face.

The second gift was a rainbow Bloomin’ Quilt-As-You-Go cushion featuring a colourful sugar skull in the centre for my friend Julia.

Julia is smart, bold, fierce, loud, and caring; she has an affinity with Parks and Rec's wonderful Donna Meagle. Her house is full of rainbows (really!) so this one should be right at home.

It was my first time doing any sort of improv piecing; I normally have diagrams sketched on grid paper for each of my pieced projects. I really enjoyed creating from organised chaos!

I can't wait to make more "perfect gifts" for Galentine's Day! :D

++Quilt

The quilt pile increments with my latest finish; a crib sized blue and orange plus quilt! The quilt has been gifted to my friends Jane and Matt, who are expecting their first baby at the end of September.

To be truthful, I started this quilt long before Jane fell pregnant, around two and a half years ago with no specific recipient in mind. I guess I just trusted that the right parents/baby would present themselves in time.

After receiving a package of fabric I'd recently bought from the US, I couldn't wait to cut into this cute foxy fabric, and I'd been wanting to make a plus quilt for a while. I picked out some blues and oranges that matched nicely. The result was foxes and robots, which is conceptually incongruous but... still very cute!

I used some scraps to piece the back, folded my finished quilt top and back, and away they went into a drawer for two spins around the sun.

Earlier this year I found out Jane was pregnant and my immediate (and incredibly selfish) thought was, "Sweet! I get to make another baby quilt!" But when I remembered the foxes and robots waiting for an owner, I resumed the project and got quilting.

Jane studied pure maths at uni, and Matt is a software developer like me, so the pluses felt especially right. Incidentally they are also expecting a boy, although I thought the colours were right because Jane would like them, not because they are "boy" colours. Like me, they're not the kind of people who think colours are gendered.

Since I made the quilt a while ago, most of the fabrics I used are out of print. Nevertheless they are:

• Monaluna Anika by Jennifer Moore (Foxy, Polka)
• Robot Factory by Caleb Gray (Mini Robots Blue, Mini Robots Orange, Gears Earth, Circuits in Navy for the binding)
• 1001 Peeps by Lizzy House (Scheherazade in Orange, Jewels in Basra Blue, Jewels in Jinnee Orange)

Seeing Green

Today I'm showing off an afghan I finished earlier this year. In March (yes, I am a terrible procrastinator) my husband and I spent a few days in the Blue Mountains to celebrate our anniversary, and I decided to take advantage of the backdrop for a little photo shoot.

The place we stayed was called Possums Hideaway, in Blackheath. We had a private and very cosy bungalow which had it's own little fireplace, which we enjoyed despite not strictly needing it at that time of year...

I could blather on about the stunning vistas and perfect weather, but I suppose I should mention the afghan I made, given this is supposedly a craft blog.

I used a free pattern I found online consisting of alternating V and shell stitches. It was so simple to work, and yet the effect is quite striking, I think.

I chose three shades of blue-toned greens and black to create an ombre effect. The two darkest wools were Panda brand Magnum Soft, which is 100% acrylic but such a pleasure to work with and reasonably priced -- especially if you're buying on sale in Summer!

I was having a great time pottering about in the bush around our bungalow taking photos in the early Autumn sunshine. It was our last day, and we were taking our time getting ready to drive home.

I was pretty surprised to find myself nose to nose with this little fellow, up way past his bed time! He gave me a bit of a fright, but given he was inhabiting a "feeding box" attached to the bungalow, he wasn't phased by his human encounter at all. I don't imagine we're the first (nor the last) people contributing to his furry rotundness, after all.

I guess they don't call it Possums Hideaway for nothing!

Blackheath is beautiful. I suspect we'll be coming back. :)

Retro Cushions

My talented friend Georgia, whose photos I've used on this blog more than once before, called for a Crafternoon. Having formed an idea of a present she wanted to make for her boyfriend, Georgia wanted me to help her realise her vision. It was a good opportunity to reciprocate benefiting from her photographic skills in the past, so the date was set!

Georgia had found this awesome fabric with retro floppy disks, and the print was conveniently cushion sized.

We didn't quite have exactly four complete disks on the ~1 metre panel of fabric, so we decided to use as much as we could for the back, plus some border fabric to make a flap.

She wanted the covers to have a loose fit, to give the cushions a nice chill slouchy look. Normally I go for the opposite by either making the cover smaller than the insert and/or filling the insert with additional stuffing. To achieve this look we made the covers to the same dimensions as the insert, approx. 45cm squared.

We were originally thinking of using zips for the cushion closures, but I had these fantastic blue snap studs that were too perfect a match, and great excuse to use my snap press!

Fast forward a few weeks and I can reveal the result of my gardening project with the recycled doors and pink pots foreshadowed in my last post. Georgia kindly helped me arrange the plants on the doors, and of course photographed the result for me. Et voila!

Much credit must also go to my friend Nick, whose handy work has been featured on this humble blog before. Nick helped me convert a massive, very heavy, hardwood door into two manageable pieces (left and middle panels in the picture). The circle of reciprocation continues in the guise of some jeans that need hemming... :)

Double Knitting

The holidays have come and gone, and what began with many intentions to sew up a storm during my break from work, ended with a new layer of dust on the sewing machine. So instead of something new I'm going to post something that I made a few years ago.

After learning some basic Fair Isle knitting I started looking for a cow pattern so I could make something my husband would like. What I came across what a pattern for a knitted cow dishcloth using double knitting, a technique I'd never used before.

Of course, I'm not one to shy away from a challenge. :) As it turned out, double knitting was not all that difficult. If you can knit ribbing, and have some basic Fair Isle experience, you should find double knitting quite manageable.

We use this "dishcloth" as a sort of placemat for protecting our coffee table from our beverages. Double knitting would also be really awesome for making scarves.

While I didn't get up to much on the craft front over Christmas (actually, there is another afghan which is nearly finished...), I did get my hands dirty (sorry) in the garden. I went for a few walks with my sister to offset the Christmas pud, and we *ahem* collected a few cuttings from the neighbourhood.

Succulents are just so easy to grow from cuttings, and I've had real joy watching them all sprout roots and join my starting-to-get-out-of-control collection. I've attempted to offset all the incoming plants by giving a few away (to friends with bigger backyards, ha!). To my friend Matt (Olivia's dad) I wrapped up three aloes and a rose geranium in newspaper. The seedlings can be planted straight into the ground with the newspaper (it's dead plant material after all).

With the new succulents and other plants I'm going to keep I'm cooking up another vertical garden project, using an old wooden door and a bunch of pots I bought from my new favourite shop, The Bower. No doubt there'll be another post once it comes together. :)