Elka's blankets

I love quilts, but I'm not a very diligent quilter. I have trouble with the repetitiveness of making matching blocks, I'm a bit impatient with my measurements, and I generally loose interest three quarters of the way through, which results in things sitting around for years and years, or in much smaller quilts than I originally intended... but I did manage to finish 2 quilts for Elka to play on while I was pregnant, one is this scrap quilt that I started yonks ago, and the other one I started 4 years ago when I was still at uni and so I could only find time on during breaks, and it got pushed aside time and time again...




But they are finished, and sewn together in that wonky, lazy way that would scare true-blue quilting types.

I also managed to start two new quilts along the way, both of which have come to a stand-still, the one below was just a way using up my left-over screen prints, and I decided to sew it together by hand, but considering how hot is was last summer and how enormous and impatient I became, it's still waiting for me to get back to it. I also managed to make 17 blocks of a 20 block quilt. I think they are lovely and I made them in a mad, obsessive rush, and then one day (in September) I stopped, and I don't even know where I stored them... but I'm sure they will make a lovely quilt some day...


Lucky I have a grandmother who takes quilting seriously, who can sew triangles perfectly and who takes orders.



Lucky me, and Lucky Elka!

B.

More for baby...

A basket to hold the blocks I picked up at the op shop (before my op shop swearing off of course!), which I made from lots of my red/pink scraps of fabric, I think I got a bit inspired while I was making the patchwork horse from the Softies book. I loosely used this pattern/tutorial from The Stitchin' Chicken.

And finally something for the baby from the Softies book, this is Mama Bear and she was designed by Nest Studio.

And cupcake booties, which my Mum crocheted for me after I gave her this US pattern, which she had to translate into her Australian crocheting knowledge.

And another pinafore, which is a bigger size than the others I made. I made it well before Christmas but I didn't have any nice buttons for it, so after looking everywhere I knew to look from Spotlight, Lincraft & HobbySew, to all the op shops in the area, as well as a few vintage clothes shops, and then to Etsy, I started to give up on the idea of really nice buttons... and instead started bemoaning this to everyone I know, which resulted in my Nanna sitting me down with ALL her buttons at Christmas time, and allowing me to pick out the ones I wanted. And I must have winged quite loudly, because when I got home, Joe's Mum had sent me a little parcel full of her old buttons as well. So now I can only complain that I have too much choice...

The old ones are sooo much nicer!

B.

how to find new flickr faves and...

1. world metro map PILLOW, 2. his rose garden is immaculate, 3. 1976 Ondori Simple Cross Stitch 4, 4. for miss ethel..., 5. needlefelted peach rainy cloud, 6. Art Wall, 7. ♡heart, 8. It's true., 9. Gnome And Mushroom Bee Modern Two

Sometimes when I'm bored on the internet, I like to go to flickr, and click on my 'favourites' in the 'you' menu. I pick a picture I love, and then I go to that person's flickrstream and click on their 'favourites'. And I pick a favourite photo of theirs and look at that person's flickrstream, and check out their 'faves', and keep searching and looking and I always end up with a whole bunch of awesome new faves in my stash.

This is exactly what I did yesterday afternoon, and even though I've had a tummy bug, a terrifying antenatal class and an emergency visit to the midwife (everything is a-ok, and was more panic related than anything physiological!), I ended my afternoon on the lounge with a bunch of felt, and a needle and thread sewing some stuff which had been in my head for a very long time, and which had gotten there via one such flickr expedition a few weeks ago...

These are my lazy, soft, freehand, but satisfying tributes to my following flickr faves:

Mobile by The Future Project, picture by Maayanpearl.

And to this awesome picture by Maggie & Sparrow which isn't sharable but it is cool- and it's the word that I like so much, but I've come up with my own...

B.

Mine's bigger...

Ever since I was a little girl, I have known how to make a proper mess. It's just that as an adult, you have more than one room to mistreat... and now that it's getting to be so warm, I can't stand the mess, I think all the sunshine somehow makes the chaos less bearable. So despite the fact I have my first market since June next Sunday, I've had to stop, breathe and organise.

Hopefully the rest of the flat will be this well organised soon. Wish me luck!

P.S. The subway fabric that everyone loves so much is available here! And it is soft and lovely- not quite as soft and lovely as the Heather Ross seahorse fabric you can see in the photo, but still, it's lovely!

B.

Look, no toys!

Well actually I have been steadily making (and stuffing) toys all week long, but I thought I'd share some other crafty endeavours related to the most popular topic at our house at the moment... lots of them I made weeks and weeks ago, they actually helped pull me out of the spotless house syndrome I was going through in the first 14 weeks, where the lounge-room was clean and the fabric was all packed away. That's not the case anymore.

I had been making bibs for my market stall, and they were all from tea-towels and the like, but I've let my opping wane a little over the past couple of months and thought it would be good to use up some of those pieces that were too small for anything much, but too big to bin... and I found this piece of linen that I screen printed way-back-when...

Normally I think kids should stay well away from politics, but I just couldn't help myself with this lovely Propagandhi quote. The bib pattern is from here.

And a snuggler, which looks more like this, it's just that mine is folded in half! It's from my Lotta Jansdotter book. And I made it from summer-weight fabrics rather than snuggly winter ones. And some shoes from this here pattern.

And a doll's quilt. I managed to find a second hand toy cradle which Joe is currently painting up, this is my contribution. Inspired by this amazing full sized baby quilt. I found it through this awesome quilty post by Kelly at My Happy Little Life, and I'm three squares away from finishing a cot sized quilt inspired by the squarey one (second from the top) in that post, but those pictures are for another day!

And I'm sorry if I started too many sentences with the word 'and', now I'm an adult, I know that it's technically okay to do so, but in primary school, it was strongly shunned and I still feel a little pang of 'inappropriateness' whenever I do it!

B.

Life on Mars:

Joe and I have been talking about how much our lives have changed already, and we still have 4 full months to go until everything changes utterly and completely, forever, or so we keep hearing! It feels a little like being on an alien planet sometimes... I just noticed today how it odd it is to do the washing-up from a distance, that is, I can't get as close to the sink as I used to, and I've started to need to sleep during the day, which I've always detested, and my ability to sew is erratic, some days, I can churn them out, others, nothing happens. There is no routine or rhythm, but this is what it looks like:

Something for the little one, from Simple Sewing for Babies, which is actually full of really easy things to sew, AND I managed to find some rattle inserts for once in my life... here. They sell out a lot, so you need to keep checking back if they don't have any in.

Regular blinkies, and some baby blinkies have emerged too, thanks to Emma-Lee's need for smallness for an ingenious Christmas marketing plan she has coming up!

And the piles (and piles) of recently sewn, but as yet, unstuffed softies, and this photo doesn't include the new Spring/Summer version of my dew drops... you don't want to know how many there are!

Hopefully more will happen on the stuffing front soon!

B.

One of those weeks...

When everything that could have gone wrong in terms of sewing and time management did go wrong! One of my most popular little critters right now is little lamb, but little lamb requires white chenille... I'm all out of it yet again, and in a bid to find a viable long term solution I found this beautiful feeling baby blanket fabric. I thought 'score'... I made 8... I won't tell you how long that takes... I sat down to stuff the first one and poked a hole through the leg quite close to the seam with the stuffing stick. It happened again and again, but in all different places. And this was not the only sewing related disaster, but with some deep breathes, I'm chalking it up and starting again this week.

Wish me luck!

B.

Panda happiness at last:

I've been sewing ALL week this week, from Monday morning right up to 5:13 this evening, and it's been full on. I thought that I was going to do both Glebe and Bondi Markets this weekend, but with the completely miserable Sydney weather I've decided to skip Glebe and leave Bondi to be decided sometime tomorrow. So now I have much more stock than I expected to have, and copious amounts of sewing always leads to new ideas, to sketching and to new little critters coming into existence.

I have been on the quest for the perfect panda for soooo long! And finally I'm happy with one. I feel like I've made about a million different types, but they just didn't pass the cuteness test. Some of you may remember the enormous panda I made last year (in the background), when I was busy making lots of Spring Lambs last September, and now I present Little Panda, who is a version of my Little Lamb who was new (and very popular) at Finders Keepers, so my brain definitely links pandas and lambs somehow... well maybe it has more to do with the chenille... ?

And Joe gave me the best idea this morning too, alpacas! And I have some lovely soft and fluffy teddy bear fabric that will work perfectly... And now I have tomorrow to do nothing more than sew, sew, sew!

B.

EDIT: These little critters along with many other Blinking Flights friends, including Dew Drop Girls, Blinkies, Egg Dolls, Meekoos, and the even more can now be found at the Monsterthreads Shop in Paddington. I went there yesterday, and it's very nice, I suggest you check out the fabulous hat wearing bear they have painted behind the counter-- too cute!

hello little blog!

It seems to have been a whole entire week since I wrote anything to you. I've been a very busy person this last week, having recently decided to embrace my whole personality as opposed to continually fighting all my short comings, I figured that the best thing to do was to leave all the sewing for Finders Keepers to the last minute. You see, I would have left all the sewing to the last minute anyhow, but I would have wasted an additional 2 weeks pretending (to myself and everyone around me) that I was doing other things for Finders Keepers, that is, a bunch of completely unnecessary stuff in the name of stall presentation, in designing something new without enough time to actually make enough of the new design to sell, and so on and so forth. I need a deadline to make things apparent in my mind, and now I have one! One week today, I will have to be completely finished all the sewing, the stuffing, the counting, the packing, the cleaning of the stall stuff, and the name tags too... and its starting to look like I will be, and like practically everything will be brand spanking new, and never seen before by anyone except me... and Joe who complained 'I can't have an opinion on every single one' when I took the time last night to show him 30 new blinkies, 10 new drop girls, and 4 new meekoos. He's right, but they take so darn long to make that I have an opinion on each and every one of them.

So, if in Sydney, you MUST come to the market. Below are the details, and if you like my stuff, I guarantee that you will love all the fabulous stuff there, it only happens 2 times a year and its definitely worth the effort! Check the designer profiles here, and I will post some more details about how to get there and my prices during the next week.

Happy Thursday! Almost the weekend for you folks out there in working-away-from-home-land!

B.

Doll Fabrics:

I've been making some custom dolls over the last few weeks, and decided that it might be a good idea to have a fabrics set on my flickr page so people know what I have. I'm not sure how it will work in terms of when I run out, but it will provide a good place for inspiration and ideas, I will try and update it each week. The little doll here is named Ursula, and she is made from a machine embroidered pillow case I picked up at the op shop recently... I have a bunch of pretty things like this here at the moment too & they work really well with modern fabrics.

----------------------------------------------

My market highlight from this weekend was when a very serious girl, about eight years old, took one of my cards and asked if I was at the markets often. She told me that she loved my dolls and fabrics and that she was going to save up. Very sweet and made me smile.

I can't believe it's Autumn already... jeepers!

B.

Now you can make a meekoo too!

I finished the meekoo pattern and added it to my Etsy Shop, so now you can make a meekoo too! There aren't any photos in the listing, but I've made the cutest, softest batch of critters from organic Japanese cotton which I hope to photograph and upload tomorrow... I got a little too focused on meekoo making last week and started seeing fabric only in terms of its ability to make cute meekoos! Oppps!

Good Night!

B.
 
 

Babushka pattern is here at last!

I just popped the Russian Doll sewing pattern over there (------------->) in the sidebar. Please feel free to comment, email, ask questions, add suggestions, I'd love to hear them.  You can also pop your creations in the Blinking Flights Flickr Group.

Happy Sewing!

B.

The. Longest. Week. Ever.

This week has been long, and a little bit like like living in the early 1990s again... in a long and winding tale of incompetence on Telstra's part, despite the fact that I am not even a Telstra customer... my phone line was swapped with someone else's... someone who didn't have an internet connection... so it was like being in the 90s except with knowledge of how good the future could be... no googling silly, curious curiosities, no googling important things either, no checking the news throughout the day, no twittering, no facebook. And it seemed to be packed full of ironic moments, where the net was truly needed...

In other news, I almost have my Russian Doll softie pattern finished, and the meekoo is well on the way-- no distractions you see! I've also been mucking around with embroidery after reading some bits and pieces on Sublime Stitching before the whole net thing went down, I decided to jump right in, and I like what I came up with... it's just like drawing, and I like drawing!

Happy Weekend!

And yes I'll be back at Glebe this weekend, hopefully in my cozy spot, although with the construction work, who knows!

B.

To make a scrap quilt:

Ok, well, here it is, in all it's half-finished glory! Please don't be critical of my wonky lines, I think they're going to look super when it's all put together!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To make your own scrap quilt:

Technically, making a scrap quilt is really, really easy, It's collecting the scraps that is the difficult and time consuming part. I have had quite a few emails asking me how I made the quilt, so I thought I'd share the details, although please be warned: this project was not planned, it just kind of grew from something small, and I didn't do anything clever like plan block sizes, or use a rotary cutter to ensure angles were correct... but you could, and in fact, maybe you should!

1. Find all your little scrap pieces and make sure they are all neat and ironed, and flat!

2. Match up pieces which are a similar length or width, and start to make some small blocks.

 

3. Make sure that you have your iron set up right near your sewing machine, so that you press flat the seams as you sew. This picture is the backside of the patchwork.

 

4. Start to join the smaller blocks together, and follow the same principle until you get some larger blocks. Then, you just join all these blocks together... it's that simple!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And I'm sure there are some people out there with some amazing scraps to work with, and a lot more space and experience with quilting than me, so I'd love to see some links if you decide to use this idea.

Since finding my second box of scraps I've been colour sorting. I now have a bag of red, blue, green and yellow, and a bag of 'white background with lots of colours in the print'. I've trimmed them into nice rectangles and squares using my rotary cutter, and I've started stitching them together. I plan to make some bags and small softies-- I'm thinking maybe a guinea pig? Upon stumbling on this little pink elephant on flickr, my mind has been filling with cute ideas...

It's by Abby Glassenberg, and she blogs about it here, and it's just one of about a million fabuolous things to discover on the blog.

Well, I hope this modest little tute answers some questions, and helps some people out!

B.

Busy, busy...

I'm in the middle of making a downloadable PDF pattern to make one of these little girls, I think it will be quite easy to make a little set of them, and I think they would look super sweet dressed up differently... for now, I'm busy drawing up little tiny instruction pictures and diagrams, and of course, spending lots of time drawing all the little details in the fabric-- I guess I'm a sucker for punishment.

I've decided that I'm going to go on a pattern making bender, the meekoo and spring lamb will be next, and I'm hoping to perfect that little Marie Antoinette type doll up there in my new header, completely inspired by my overdose on the Sofia Coppola movie a little while ago... I love the big, big hair, you can see it much better in the movie, but this is the gist:

 

And my little dolls and blinkies arrived home safe from their debut at the Notebook offices, a shortened version of the dew drop girl pattern, (just the Lucy girl), and the blinky pattern will be in the April edition, so keep your eyes peeled... and a very big thank you to Vanessa for recognising the cuteness of my little people! :)

B.

P.S. No Glebe this weekend, just Kirribilli on Sunday.

Scrapless.

Do you save up the most pathetically tiny little scrap pieces of fabric? I do. I find that I just can't part with them, I think it's because I'm selling a lot of my toys, the beautiful fabrics just up and leave... and I want to remember them.

So yesterday in a completely unplanned act of madness and obsession, I started sewing the scraps together, and what I have now is a quilt top, about cot size, and it reminds me of all the toys and fabrics I've been using. I also have sore shoulders, eyes that are having trouble focusing, and a kitchen that looks like a bomb hit it, every mug and glass has been used... and my scrap basket is practically empty as opposed to overflowing!

I hope you all have a nice day off, and think about the lovely diversity that is Australia, and about the thousands and thousands of years of complex culture that was already here. (It's 'Australia Day' today for OS peeps!).

B.

New at Monster Threads.

This is Ivy, her and her pals Inez and Sabrina are now hanging out at Monster Threads  in Newtown, waiting for someone to take them home and adore them. There  are also some new blinkies and a very spunky red meekoo named Sam!

Unfortunately, now my work table is one big mess...

B.

So off I go to clean...

Because tea towels are rad.

I've gotten well into using tea towels to make my blinkies. I got the idea when my grandmother gave me a big bag full of rags for Joe's paint brushes, and I couldn't possibly waste the kitchness value of the tea towels... they were too perfect. One tea towel makes about 2 blinkies, but there is often this little piece left over-- the perfect size to make a bib from!

Mind the fabric paint stain on this one, but I think it's a great idea, tea towels get really soft as they get worn, and obviously they were made to wipe stuff up!

If you want to have a go, there are some free patterns here:

Chickpea Sewing Studio
Nested
Made by Petchy

I also found a cool flickr group which showcases people's funky tea towel creations: it's here.

And below are some sneak peaks!

Now it's time to sample an apple pastizzi-- we've just recently discovered the delights of frozen pastizzies from our local fruit shop... so so so very good!

B.