Busy

There’s been very little crafting happening here at Ruth’s Place over the last few days. Study is keeping me busy.

Gorgeous Girl had a ‘sick’ day today. She has a cough and a runny nose and she really didn’t want to go to school this morning, so we kept her home for the day. We spent the morning doing some school work (her choice). She asked me to bring some workbooks back from my last visit to Australia (“because there is too much colouring in at school and the work is too easy”) and so we’ve been working through them when she is interested. This morning we did adding by fives, the short o and a sounds, a short consonant review and then the long a, e and i sounds. It’s a phonics workbook. I think she learned just as much as if she’d been at school…

After that we did some colouring in. At the beginning of 2012 we visited my good friend Lisa and her family in New South Wales. She gave Gorgeous Girl a lovely Very Hungry Caterpillar fabric panel that you colour yourself. We had to wait until I found fabric markers and then I waited until I was sure Gorgeous Girl could colour nicely. Today was the day to colour.

She took it very seriously.

The finished panel. There were a few slips of the pens.

After lunch we began work on the butterfly. Once interest waned we packed it up for next time, but not before I snapped a shot of the work in progress.

Gorgeous Girl has said she would like the caterpillar to be a placemat, so I’ll see what I can turn out on Sunday.

I’ve had a problem with mould on one of my spinning wheels. Just one, and in the whole spraying it with clove oil to kill the mould, the cotton drive band shrunk. I couldn’t find a suitable replacement and Weaving Rose   very kindly sent me some linen thrums left over from her weaving that work a treat. This meant I was able to finish off this fibre which had been sitting on the wheel.

My first attempt at fluffy merino singles. I’m quite proud of them. These are unwashed, so still a bit twisty in places. At the moment we are getting a lot of afternoon rain so these are sitting in a bowl on my bookshelf waiting for fine weather.

The top  photo has the truer colour. This is fibre that I dyed myself when I first started spinning, so it’s been marinating in the stash for a while.

Since I didn’t have to do the school run today (less driving and walking) my foot is feeling pretty good. I’m hoping to spend some time working on my brother’s wedding quilt tonight. What do you have planned?

Read Full Post »

Bananas, parties, paper and playing along

One thing we enjoy about living in Papua New Guinea is the availability of tropical fruit. Currently we are enjoying passion fruit from the vine that has scaled the side of the house. A little while ago Gorgeous Man and Gorgeous Girl went to the market and came home with red bananas. They were very small.

And very delicious. They didn’t last long! This is the first time we’ve seen red ones for sale. Hopefully it won’t be another 18 months before we see them again.

This week Gorgeous Girl was invited to a birthday party for one of our neighbours who was turning two. She was thrilled that the invitation said to bring her bathers.

The hosts had set this up in their backyard.

By the end of the afternoon, the patch of ground Gorgeous Girl is standing on was a mudpit.

The kids had a ball.

I signed up for Pinterest ages ago, but didn’t use it at all until about a fortnight ago. I’m trying to keep my pins to a small number so that I’ll actually do something that is inspired by them rather than be overwhelmed by the sheer volume. As chance would have it Practical Scrappers  recently had a post on Pinterest inspired projects and I pinned two of them to try.

Here’s what I made recently.

Stretching myself a bit to add more hand drawn detail to the page. I think the secret is to be really confident with your pen strokes. This is an old, old, old picture of me. It was my last year of college and the girl on the right and I had travelled to my home state of Western Australia. We are with two of my high school friends. None of us are in WA any more, one is in the UK, one is in PNG and one is in Queensland. My friend on the end passed away in 2007 and Gorgeous Girl’s middle name was chosen to remember her.

I also made a card, inspired by Practical Scrappers, to use up some of the leftovers from the page.

Not sure I’ve pulled it off 100%, but it will do.

Finally I’ve decided to play along with Tour de Fleece this year on Ravelry (for the non-spinners this is a spinning ‘competition’ designed to mirror the Tour de France. This is what I’m hoping to get through.

Some silk, some merino dyed by me and some wensleydale. I probably won’t get through it all because, well I’m a student and I’ll be travelling for two weeks during the tour, but it doesn’t hurt to have goals, right?

I have a finished knitted object, but need to wait for the weather to clear (I will never complain about the rain because it cools things down marginally) so that I can photograph it. I’ve also started to ply up some laceweight singles I’ve been spinning for ages. I think it’s going to be lovely yarn when it’s done.

Read Full Post »

Platypus (softy) surgery

Last week Gorgeous Girl’s platypus made an unexpected trip through the washing machine. He came out looking like this.

Very lumpy and misshapen. I carefully unstitched the hand stitching and removed the stuffing. Then a quick run under the iron to smooth out the wrinkles.

Then I restuffed him and sewed him shut again.

As good as new and one happy Gorgeous Girl.

In 2011 I bookmarked this tutorial for a gorgeous needle book case. Today I dug into the felt and embroidery stashes (these are both very small) and finally made one.

I need to get ink for the printer and so couldn’t print out the templates provided on in the tutorial, so I free hand drew the cloud shapes and the embroidery.

I used a back stitch for the swirl, I need to learn some more embroidery stitches at some stage. The three layers are joined along the top of the cloud.

I’m really pleased with how this turned out. It was quick and easy and I think these would  make a nice little gift for crafty friends.

Read Full Post »

Another scrapbook page

I made two pages in my last scrapping session, but because one was for an online challenge I didn’t want to confuse things by showing the other one as well.

This is just a simple page which celebrates a very big occasion.

Gorgeous Man’s graduation where he officially became Dr Gorgeous Man Excuse the scribble hiding his real name.
The owls and florish were fussy cut from patterned paper (not the same one) and the text box circle is a Kaisercraft rub on.

I’m discovering that rubons don’t really hold up well here in PNG. The Kaisercraft ones have held up the best and if I was going to buy rubons to stash that would be my brand of choice, but some of the cheaper brands have suffered from the humidity and stuck to the plastic. I think I’ll end up using the partial rubons as a grungy sort of background at some point.

Today I need to restuff a platypus. This little fellow accidentally ended up going through the washing machine.

And became horribly lumpy and misshapen as the stuffing inside felted. I promised a distressed Gorgeous Girl that I would carefully unpick one side and restuff and sew him back up again. Then, if there is time I’m going to tackle on of the gazillion online tutorials I’ve bookmarked to try.

I find, that because I quilt, most of my time on the sewing machine ends up being used for the big projects, like the current quilt in progress, and all the cute little things I want to make get neglected. So this year I’ve committed to spending some time each week to working on either one of the myriad place mat panels I’ve got waiting to be used, or a small pattern from a book/magazine in my library or an online resource. I’ve spent the last two small sewing sessions on placemats, so time to try an online tutorial.

I hope you have a great day. Thanks for stopping by.

Read Full Post »

Sketch + things with wings

I was totally stunned on Friday when I saw on the Frosted Designs blog  that I was the grand prize winner for the May blog hop! I had told Gorgeous Girl that I was entering and when she asked if I’d win I explained how we enter things just to enjoy playing along and that it was very unlikely that Mummy would win. So I’m now a liar

Then later that afternoon I read on Cathi’s blog  that I was the random winner in her blog hop giveaway. You could have knocked me down with a feather. From Frosted Designs I’ve won a chipboard pack from Molossi.  Because we are not sure how reliable postage to PNG is I’m having the prize sent to my long-suffering SIL who will hold it for me until I am in Brisbane in November. I’m thrilled to win the prize, but bummed it’s going to be so long before I get to play with it.

Cathi and I have decided to test the PNG postal waters with her package, so that should turn up in a few weeks time. Thank you Cathi and Molossi.

Anyway, so I had the scrapping stuff out and thought I’d have a go at using the Frosted Designs Sketch + things with wings challenge. 

We had to follow the sketch and add something with wings. Here is the sketch.

Here is my take on the sketch.

It didn’t quite work out the way I had in mind, but I’m very happy with the outcome. I like simple pages. The green paper is deep stash. I remember buying it when I first got into making cards in 2003 at least it has a useful life now and there is still a tiny bit left to use in another project). I can’t name the other products except for the rub-ons which are from Kaisercraft.

I live in a country with no scrapbooking stores. I’ll pause a minute so some of you can regain your breath

This means I work from stash and there are some papers that I love and want to stretch as far as possible. The red backing paper is one of these, so I trimmed around the inside rather than just covering the whole thing with paper.

First I traced around the green paper and then I drew lines on all sides 1/2 an inch in from that line.

It’s kind of hard to see the lines on the patterned paper. Then I trimmed along the inside line.

Ready to have the green layered on top, and there is a large centre piece left over to use again on another project.

Please visit Frosted Designs to see how others have interpreted the sketch.

Read Full Post »

More sewing

Even though Gorgeous Man has been away since Friday for work, I did manage to sneak in a little bit of sewing. These place mats are so quick and easy to make. Again I’m ignoring my internal OCD which is telling me that they are printed off the straight-of-grain.

Two different backing fabrics as I didn’t have enough of just one. This time around, in order to stablise the batting a little more, I did a line of stitching around the inner picture. This was in addition to the top stitching I did around the edges of the last one,

which you can sort of see in this picture. The African Hoopoe was one of my favourite birds while we were living in South Africa, it was really lovely to see them in the front yard on occasion. These are the first set of Christmas gifts I’ve finished for the year. We won’t be arriving in Australia for Christmas until just a few days before, since (apart from exceptionally good local produced chocolate) there isn’t much to buy here in PNG (aside from touristy items) I’m hoping to make most of our gifts again this year. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m slowly chugging away on some lace using some handspun.

Of course unblocked pictures of lace do not show off the full extent of its glory. Pattern details can be found here.

Gorgeous Man gets home late this evening. Gorgeous Girl has been promised that she can stay up to see him when he gets home (because he is arriving after dark I am not doing the airport pick-up). We’ll both be glad to see him home.

Read Full Post »

Scrapbook pages

I made two scrapbook pages this week. This one is my favourite from my scrapbooking session.

I’ve incorporated the jounalling into the border decoration and the handmade flowers are similar to those I saw on a blog this week, can’t remember which one though…

Here’s a close up of the flowers. I really like these.

The flowers were from an old book I’m deconstructing. It’s a classic history text and due to my frequent attendance (when we lived in Australia) at massive second hand book sales, I ended up with a paperback and the hard cover, so the paperback is aiding my crafting. The centres of the flowers were fussy cut from some scrap paper I had in the stash. I seem to be into pointy tags at the moment.

Not so sure this second page works terribly well, but it is what it is.

I’m slowly working my way through the pile of photos. Not fast enough since I’m planning on printing off all of the Brazil photos for scrapping when we get to Australia in July (it’s cheaper to do it there) and I need to dig out my CD of Amsterdam/USA photos from 2010 and print and scrap them as well…

There was also spinning this week. This is a Southdown wool that is a traditional three-ply.

It’s a little bit redder than this in real life. I’m planning to use it for socks. (At some stage, there is no rush on the sock front  as it never gets cold enough for handknit socks here in Papua New Guinea).

At Gorgeous Girl’s request I made her a monster chunk of her very own. We will be picking the felt for its teeth tomorrow and then it will be done.

 

Read Full Post »

I finally “did that”

When we lived in South Africa we would visit tourist places and craft markets and I’d see sewn place mats for sale. I’d look at them closely and then think to myself “I can do that.”

I even went to the fabric store and bought the fabric so that ‘I could do that.’

Finally, over 18 months after leaving South Africa, I broke out the place mat fabric and I did that.

and the reverse

I bought the reverse fabric in South Africa with place mats in mind. There was enough to do 6 place mats  with about 10cm long strip left over.

The thing that was holding me back from using this is that the images were printed very skew on the fabric and it was impossible to square them up. Eventually I told my internal OCD that these were going to get food spilled on them and thrown in the washer repeatedly and it was better to have them out being used, than languishing in the stash, and that being ‘perfect’ really doesn’t matter at this point, for this project.

I’m embarrassed it took me so long to make the first batch of place mats (there are many, many sets in the stash waiting to be worked up). It only took a few hours.

Read Full Post »

Making

There’s been some making going on here at Ruth’s place.

This was a really quick little knit.

He took two evenings. Free pattern can be found here.

Made from handspun. This was my first time using safety eyes. I love the effect. Good thing I bought a multi-eye packet so that I can use them again. Gorgeous Girl is now asking for one of her own, so expect to see at least one more of these here, at some point.

Only one scrapbook page got made this week. An old photo of Gorgeous Girl.

Hand cut tags and flags, hand drawn edging and jounalling. The ‘a’ in Beautiful is actually a cut down ‘q’. This used up some smaller scraps. Some of the embellishments were fussy cut from scrapbook pages. I’m slowly working my way through the scrapbooking hoard stash. It’s amazing how inventive I get when I don’t have a scrapbooking store nearby.

I spent Friday morning running around town getting quotes on repairing the car. I’m very thankful for a friend who gave up her morning off to come with me. Some of the mechanics/smash and dent places I’d never have found on my own and it was nice to have another person with me for company and to help navigate some of Port Moresby’s heavier traffic areas.

Read Full Post »

A finish

This is what I was going to show you before getting side-tracked by my little ‘incident’. (And no, I don’t know why Gorgeous Girl has put a brick on the balcony – just noticed that in the photo now)…

My finished sewing machine mat. It’s not going to win any awards for either piecing or hand quilting, but it was a good learning experience as my first (but not my last) free motion quilting piece. This came entirely from scraps – both left overs from old quit projects and other people’s scrap bags (Kate).

Here is it is in use.

I don’t know if you can quite see the polka dot binding. I just love the way it works with the scrappiness of the quilt. This was inherited fabric from a retiring quilter that was given to me in South Africa, so it’s really vintage fabric as I know it had been in her stash for years. I can see that I’ll need to add more polka dots to the stash, I really love them.

The stars are from one of Tazzie’s patterns that was published in an old Australian Patchwork and Quilting magazine.

My current leaders and enders project is a strip quilt coming out of this box.

Yeah, it’s pretty full. I thought it might be fun to document how much it goes down in the next little while.

Finally, I’ve been sewing blocks for my brother and his partner. I finally laid them on my design floor last night to see how it was looking.

Apparently I can’t count and I made way more brown and white blocks than the number of blue blocks I cut. I’m going to add one more row to the width and two more to the length. They have requested a quilt for snuggling under on the couch while watching TV, so it doesn’t have to be enormous, but Gorgeous Man suggested that rectangular would probably be better than square.

I’m really pleased with how the fabrics are playing together in this one. It’s quite a departure for me. I don’t think I’ve ever made a quilt with such a limited number of fabrics. Normally I’m a scrappy quilter.

Read Full Post »