Hurrah!

How good is Good Sammy?

Good Sammy rocks!  It seems to be more popular since the global financial crisis, but how great is op shopping??  It's just such a great way to re-use unwanted goods - things that someone else decided they'd had enough of and gave up for charity get to have another life with someone else and the goods don't go to waste or end up in landfill and it helps a charity at the same time.  And although some people have no choice but to shop at op shops, there's such a nice sense of community at my local op shop - people of all ages and backgrounds shop there - immigrants setting up house in Australia, elderly friends out for the day, groups of teenagers looking for retro fashion, little kids buying recycled toys and giving them love all over again.  And the fabrics that can be salvaged!  Like these sheets and a scarf, all for the measly sum of $3.00.

Matilda didn't come from the op shop of course, she just had to be in the (not so great) photo.  Am looking forward to using these fabrics.  Hurrah for Good Sammy!

Happy cats

 

Can we curl up on your pillow and fill your sleep with the soothing scent of lavender while you dream?

I really enjoy making these little cats - mostly from linen, recycled kimono and cotton scraps.  I am trying to make a few 'gifty' type things to go with all the toys I'm dreaming of for the Made on the Left Market.  Sorry to harp on about it but it really has been great motivation for me so far to actually make some of the things floating about in my head and it's given me something to stay focussed on - particularly while I count down the days in the job I'm in!!

If you love the RSPCA and/or you're looking for a fun day out and you live in Perth (or nearby!), the RSPCA are holding an Open Day & Fete on November 9th, with market and fete stalls and money going to a very important cause.  More info here - all things bright & beautiful Open Day & Fete.

 

Thanks so much for the handy info left on my last post!  I love how there's a whole community of people to help each other out and give support.  Must get round to celebrating my blog anniversary soon to say thank you (I haven't forgotten!!!). 

There's someone at the frontdoor and I'm in my pyjamas

Yup, a lady down the road just knocked on the front door with a lost puppy.  Poor little thing.  Matilda was very excited to have a visitor on our porch but I felt a bit stupid answering the door in my pyjamas.  We didn't recognise the puppy but we have a fabulous local vet who finds owners of lost cats and dogs so the neighbour is taking the puppy there.  Ever have that feeling that you can't catch up with everything you have to do and your timing is all out and you want to get organised but you just never seem to get there?  That's me at the moment and that's why I'm in my pyjamas at 5.30pm.

The sorting of my craft room has progressed and some more boxes have been unpacked.  I need some new shelving to continue though so haven't been able to get going with creating things yet.  I did make a pompom from quilting cut offs, which I quite like.

I saw these on the tops of shoes in a British magazine while we were away and then Molly Chicken blogged about them when she made a couple for her daughter's room.  Lovely things to use up fabric scraps on.  I am a horder and can never throw anything away, including fabric scraps!  I am a bit of a collector too and hording plus collecting means there's a lot of "stuff" in my life.  Sometimes I feel like selling and giving away everything I own (except the very most precious things) and basking in what I imagine to be a wonderful feeling of lightness - the freeing-up of space and the banashing of clutter and having life clean and precise.  Funny cos I am also a magazine addict - particularly house and home and garden magazines - and I always love the houses that are crowded full of wonderful and interesting treasures like beautiful and fascinating bower bird nest type homes - and I flick past the pages of minimalist houses because they're too stark to me and 'empty' and a bit lifeless really.  Perhaps I'm just a bower bird at heart.  We have the local bulk rubbish collection in our neighbourhood this week (known in Australia as 'bring out the dead') and I picked up these little cuties (the cushion I made from a piece of Duckcloth fabric - can't remember the name right now but I love that spottiness!):

Ah, it's nice being a collector.  Even one that hordes, hangs out in pjs and struggles to catch up sometimes ;)

Goodies

This time last week was the inaugural Made on the Left Market.  Full of alsorts of goodies by local artisans and crafty people, it was a splendid day out - and certainly a tight squeeze inside the Hyde Park Hotel (due to the popularity of the event - oodles of people! - and the cosiness of the hotel), which was a fabulous location for it particularly in the depths of Winter (and with the proximity of food and drinks!).  There were wonderful sellers selling wonderful things.  I picked up this bunch of paper flowers by Lillybuds - they also had button bouquets, which were so nice and so clever!   I am looking forward to the next Made on the Left Market - I so hope it becomes a regular fixture for Perth.  Yeeha!

And here's some other goodies that arrived this week from Lara Cameron at Kirin & Co:

Houses and Bicycles fabric by Lara Cameron - ooooooh I love this fabric so much!

And a printed journal as I'm addicted to journals and couldn't go past this one.  Lovely postcards she sent too - I love the windowsill.

Nothing like starting the weekend with goodies :)  Hope you all have lovely weekends.  I must get into my study and start unpacking boxes this weekend too.... I feel lost without my sewing machine set-up.

Pillar

Hurrah for the weekend!  Time to de-brief, time to sleep-in, time to re-energise.  I hope!  Actually, I'm not good at sleeping in anymore... I wake up early-ish on the weekend and think of all the things I want to do... like catch up on blogging and sewing and crafting and all things other than food shopping or cleaning the house or doing the washing....hrm.  I've always thought weekends should be three days long - one day for chores, one day for socialising and one day for anything you please!!  Yar!

I made this little guy this week.  He popped into my head last weekend.  He's had a few names suggested for him but none have fitted quite right yet so for now I will call him Pillar.  Funny how sometimes names just come and other times they don't.  On the way home from work I was listening to one of my favourite guys on radio and he and his partner had a baby girl two weeks ago and his co-presenter asked her name but they still haven't named her and they have another six weeks yet before they have to give her a name!  I know some cultures wait to give names to their babies but a name is so intrinsic to a sense of identity and it seems funny to go for weeks and weeks without a name.  So Pillar it is then!  Pillar is made from felt and cotton fabrics and some of my favourites too - there's one of Heather Bailey's Freshcut designs (his end) and some Lecein fabrics (the polka dot one and a couple of his Suffolk puffs), which I really love.

After people commented on my last post, it got me thinking about left brain and right brain and I found this quiz, which was bizarrely accurate - even though it says it is for teens and I'm kinda twice as old!  sigh.  Interesting stuff anyway.

Hope your weekend is happy!

small (furry) coincidences (that sleep in teapots...)

 

Have you ever thought of something - an image, a new idea to try, something you'd like to have a go at or a new technique to master - then once you've thought of it, you notice the same sort of thing elsewhere, or something related to it or something someone else has done before you got to try it or the thing you thought of suddenly pops up in a few different places and you wonder if it's a coincidence or if these things were going to be there anyway and you just weren't looking for them before...

This is the case for me with this little guy and now I am thoroughly obsessed.

It started with an old craft book I have (and one that I LOVE - Jean Greenhowe's "Favourite Dolls and Toys" - she does wonderful knitting patterns too if you are after beautiful toy patterns to knit).  The book has a section on toy houses and in there is a Dormouse House - made totally of fabric and made to look like a tree stump.  The house has a zip running down the centre and it unzips into a loungeroom and a bedroom.  There's cozy lounge chairs and a log fire and a patchwork quilt on the bed and a family of dormice live there...

   

I loved the little dormouse house the minute I saw it and it's my only (so far!) niece's first birthday next month so I am making her a dormouse house.  She will be a bit little to play with it yet but another one of my obsessions is making her gifts rather than buying her things - we have a large family and there's a few grandkids on her Dad's side too so she has oodles of things already and will no doubt be spoilt for her first birthday (secretly anyway I'm not sure who will enjoy the dormouse house more - Amelie or me!!).

 

I haven't made the little dormice yet and there's heaps more to do but I am absolutely loving making it so far (although it's been really challenging and fiddley - miniature curtain ties are not easy to tie - it reminded me of trying to tie bows on my Strawberry Shortcake dolls' clothes when I was little...)

I haven't really thought much about dormice before (funny that..) but when I Googled them I discovered they like to hibernate, live in France, eat berries and they're soooo cute...

I searched for them on Etsy to see if anyone there shared my obsession but only a couple of things popped up.  I started to think about drawing my own dormouse pattern and then I met up with my bookclub on the weekend to see The Kite Runner (which was last month's book) and we couldn't locate copies of this month's chosen book so decided to go with the second option - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (which surprisingly none of us have ever read except for bits and some of the poems - Beware the Jabberwock my son! - and we'd all seen the Disney version) and who should appear in Chapter Seven: A Mad Tea Party but.....

The Dormouse. 

I am now dreaming of dormice and obsessing over patterns for small mice living in little teapots...maybe one day I'll make a little dormouse teapot house.

Yup.  Obsessed.

Thank you for your lovely comments about Shem and inspiration.  It's nice to know there's people out there - and such inspiring people too :)

An Owl and a Pussy Cat (and a ghost...)

My lovely sister Verity is in Japan - she sent this beautiful book to me for Christmas (wrapped of course in Hello Kitty wrapping paper!) - Kimono: Japanese Designs giftwraps by artists:

The book features 12 full-colour patterns from Japanese kimonos dating from the 18th and 19th centuries.  The patterns in the designs are wonderful:

Unfortunately, it's too hot to go outside and take decent photos so these pictures don't do the designs any justice but they are beautiful.  Last time Verity came back from Japan, she gave me this little guy:

 

Yes, I think it's a ghost on his head?  I think Verity told me what that meant and what the writing on the ghost says but I can't remember now...  The little cat and his ghost friend sit on a shelf with this little owl I made using the Moonstitches tutowlrial - a beautiful blog and a lovely tutorial :D  I used vintage Japanese kimono fabrics from a store in Perth that specialises in importing beautiful Japanese wares.

There's an Owly Love group on Flickr where beautiful owls gather together.

"Jaunty" cat on a hot day

Phew!  There's been a lot on lately but it is getting to that time of the year..  We went to the Subiaco Craft and Community Fair yesterday and managed to get most of our Christmas present shopping done - well, most of my husband's rellies and my rellies on my Dad's side.  There's still my immediate family (all 12 including 2 brothers, 3 sisters, etc etc) and my Mum's rellies etc...  I'm trying to make a few pressies - the little cat above is for my cousin's little boy Jake.  Not sure how names for toys pop into my head but this little guy looked pretty jaunty to me - actually, it's 39 degrees (I think that's over 102 in Fahrenheit) in Perth today and stinking hot so anything that's furry and looks happy is pretty jaunty to me!!

Elizabeth (the Italian lady down the road who sold her house recently and is moving [regretfully] to a retirement village) has been having a series of garage sales to off load a lifetime's worth of stuff...I bought a this roll of fabric  for $3 and a box of fabrics and, of course, more books...

ok...have tried loading that photo several times now and something's not going right...ah well, wasn't really a good pic anyway (maybe typepad knew that...??!).  Here's a cute little dolls house I picked up at a local church sale - which was on the same day as one of Elizabeth's sales so she got heaps of customers that day.  It needs a good clean but I thought it was lovely and a bargain for $5.  It's funny having a little house to clean and decorate but cos we're still renovating our house I have a big house I can't yet clean or decorate...hmmm..

  Am off now to sit in front of a fan and make another puddy for Jake's sister and another for this worthy cause.

Poochie quilt

Unstitched then stitched...

The vintage polka dot and retro Heather Ross orange dog fabric were eBay finds, the plain cotton fabrics were these thrifted table runners (also used for the backing) and a piece from a vintage Japanese kimono from here.   Kristen Doran's wonderful Molly Birds fabric made up the top left corner and some of the binding.  I used two different sized embroidery hoops for the circular stitching, which was fun for awhile until my hands cramped up and my back ached!  I thought binding the quilt would take forever too but it actually didn't take too long at all.  First time ever I've completed a quilt and I think I might now be addicted.  I'm really pleased with the stitching and the binding, although not much of it is straight but I was too impatient to measure properly (the not-so-great quality pics I am blaming on a lack of photographic space due to the renovation rather than my impatience...well it was mostly a space thing...)

Someone else was very appreciative anyway...

I think she likes the other poochies.

Getting there

If I could knit I would knit these or this.  I hope to get to that point one day - unless I get distracted by something else, which seems to happen frequently.  I've unpicked these table runners today and they're drying on the line ready for tomorrow.  I can't believe it's Thursday already - my holidays are flying by.  I had a bit of a slow start to get into crafting again this week but it's good to shift down a gear or two.  We went out to dinner last night for our 3rd wedding anniversary and thanks to a delicious meal and a fabulous red, I'm taking it very slowly today (that and I've turned into a sloth anyway).

Three lovely years.  Wonder if we'll look as sweet as this couple when we're vintage!  I love the little people on wedding cakes and tracked this vintage topper down from these fabulous people.  I think it arrived just a couple of days before our wedding.  It got there in the end though - hopefully I will too.

Thanks to Clare for the pic above.