Under instruction

Gorgeous Girl had a “teacher only” day at school today. Since I refused to let her watch TV all morning she’s done some scrapbooking and gave me strict instructions to blog about it.

Here’s her page:

She took the photo herself. I love seeing her creativity develop.

One thing I enjoy most about soft toy making is seeing the personality of the piece appear. Yesterday I sent over 40 000 words to my thesis supervisor to review and comment on and to celebrate I gave myself the evening off and sat down to put this little girl together.

Gorgeous Girl giggled with glee when she saw him – pity he’s not for her…

He still needs legs, a tail and facial features but I’m really pleased with how he’s turned out. Hopefully the recipient will like him. (Christmas making)…

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I was hoping…

I was hoping to show you a picture of my sewing machine mat all neatly trimmed with the binding sewn on ready to be hand-stitched down. BUT after putting a new bobbin of thread in the machine we had some tension issues and I spent most of Sunday afternoon with a seam ripper. On the plus side, I didn’t break any more needles. I just broke lots of thread…

It is quilted now, but will need to wait for trimming and binding until I get back from Australia. I’m flying to Brisbane on Wednesday to do an oral presentation at my university and have an interview with a committee. This is to check my progress on my thesis. It’s just a flying visit. I’ll be home by Sunday evening.

So instead of showing you a lovely quilt, here is a picture of the craft Gorgeous Girl and I did on Sunday (another reason why there is no fancy quilt picture…)

On Sunday morning Gorgeous Girl and I were watching that excellent ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) production Playschool. 

They have really great crafts  and most of the toys on the show are hand-made.  Anyway they had a cardboard box doll house and people made from various sizes of paper rolls. Gorgeous Girl realised that we had all the things needed to make one and asked if she could make a paper towel person. I’m not one to turn down craft requests, so we raided the scrapbook page scrap box and her craft box for supplies and off we went. The necklace is an old broken key chain that she has been hanging on to.

Features and accessory placement by Gorgeous Girl.

Tonight I’m planning on inflicting my oral presentation on Gorgeous Man for critiquing and then hunkering down on the couch to add more hexagons to the quilt. Those things are addictive.

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Spinning

This yarn is the summary of several months worth of spinning. It was spun on the Ashford Traditional and plied using my left foot to treadle as my right one is no longer working properly. I find treadling with my left foot awkward, so there isn’t much spinning going on at the moment. I do have a double treadle wheel, but that is too painful to use at present, and a certain Gorgeous Girl has it full of her yarn in progress.

This is from fibre that I dyed myself when I first started spinning. It was pretty matted and felted, so there was a fair amount of fibre loss. The unspinable fibre will be used to stuff soft toys.

All up I got about 390 metres (about 425 yards) so not sure what I’ll do with it yet. Probably let it sit and marinate in the stash for a while…

Yesterday I was working on getting some fabric ready to be paper pieced and Gorgeous Girl wanted to craft too. So she chose some felt from the stash (I stocked up on felt before leaving South Africa and got more when we were in Australia, it’s a good craft basic to have if you have small kids). She then borrowed my Sharpie pen and got to work. When she was done she asked to borrow my camera and took a picture.

It’s a butterfly. She also used my tiny fabric scraps to glue onto cardboard to make a collage.

I sewed down the last bit of binding for a quilt last night, but that deserves a post of it’s own, and my foot needs to feel well enough for me to go outside and photograph it.

The good news is that I now have my plane ticket and appointment to go and see the orthopedic surgeon in Australia next week. I cannot wait to be better and go for a long walk.

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