gifts and give-aways

Before the year closes, I’d like to show you some of the quilt-related things I have received in the last few weeks.

You may remember that, in November, I joined the linky party over at Vrooman’s Quilts called “Let’s Book It!”. This was the first time I had joined the party and, much to my surprise, I won that month’s give-away: a beautiful little quilt barn pin and a quilt charm to attach to it. So cute! Thanks so much, Sharon.

Sharon was one of the most regular followers of my now-defunct linky party, “Something Old, Something New” and her blog inspires me with quilting ideas and links to other “scrappy quilters” that it should be me sending her a gift not the other way around!

Christmas has been and gone for another year (although in my family tradition, Christmas begins on 25 December and ends on the Feast of the Epiphany, 6 January, so our lights, decorations and tree are still up. That may change this weekend!). It’s time to show you the quilt-related gifts I received (exactly when did this blog stop being primarily about knitting? LOL) :

Firstly, my mum gave me a book called Scrap Quilt Sensations by Kim Brackett.

I first saw this book on Sharon’s blog and fell in love with this quilt called “Island Chain”.

Sharon made hers in a very different (and prettier IMHO) colour combination. I just had to have the book so that I could make my scrappy version. I would have been happy to find one pattern that I liked; there are several so that’s a bonus. You can expect to see quilts made from patterns in this book (or at least inspired by them) over the next couple of years.

Then WM surprised me with EQ7 software – since I am an inveterate computer-user (DD says I am not a nerd but I love computers and my iPad; I have to force myself to stay away from them to do other things, even the things I love – luckily my sewing machine is also a form of computer! LOL) and like to design my own quilts, this is a perfect gift for me (when I make the time to read the 250+ pages of the manual!) I am looking forward to playing with it but first I have projects I need to bring to completion. (No, I didn’t get a design wall but I have a birthday in April – if I can wait that long!)

DD bought WM and I Lindt Lindor chocolate balls packaged in a giant Lindor shaped container. To give you some idea of scale, I have photographed it with my 4” red-work pin-cushion (made by Anorina who blogs at Samelia’s Mum – another give-away win! I love it and use it a lot, Anorina – thanks heaps! BTW, Anorina has made the pattern for this embroidery available on her blog)

DD also gave each of us a class from Craftsy – WM got a photography-related one, I got Art Quilting 101. I can’t show you a photo because the picture on Craftsy is a hyperlink to my class!

If you’ve never tried Craftsy and you’re into Sewing, Quilting, Knitting, Drawing, Photography, Gardening, Woodwork or Cooking (to name a few) you really should have a look. There are many free mini-classes to whet your appetite; they are always available after you enrol and Craftsy has some great sale prices at frequent intervals! They also do patterns (both free and available for purchase), kits and supplies, as well as showing projects and having their own blog. And, as a disclaimer, I am not being paid for this, I have no affiliation with Craftsy except as a very happy consumer. I have had reason to experience their customer service (I ordered a class for WM and it ended up on my classes because I pressed the wrong purchase button) and it was unbelievably fast and excellent!

We spent Christmas Day with SIL’s parents. They gave me six fat quarters of Christmas fabric – what a lovely, thoughtful present for a quilter. Thank you, J&A.

Finally, a Christmas present from “Santa”; an item that has been on my Book Depository wishlist for quite some time: Connecting Quilts, Art & Textiles by M. Joan Lintault. This only arrived yesterday so I haven’t even opened it yet!

I believe in shopping locally where possible but sometimes I can get books from The Book Depository for almost half of what I would pay for them in Australia. The Book Depository has free shipping worldwide so there is a great saving to made. Plus books are delivered right to my door!

So, I’m set with quilting-related material for the New Year. (Speaking of the new year, I hope you’re all enjoying my new blog header – that view was taken from my deck! Gotta love those trees!)

Knitting? What’s that? LOL

Did you receive any books or other items related to your hobbies recently?

PS Thanks, WM, for the photos!

Christmas in Australia snapshots

Posted from Blogger app where I have no control of photo size or location!

Up at 6am to a cry of "Santa didn't come!" -- his Santa sack wasn't at the end of the bed but in the lounge room near the Christmas tree.

  

Raiding of Santa sacks, playing with toys and posing for photos followed by a breakfast of bacon and eggs cooked on the barbecue.

Presents -- the first time the boys have had a tree at home with presents underneath it. Mummy was almost as excited as the boys!

Off to Ma and Pa's place for more presents (no photos) and Christmas lunch. So much food!

Watermelon -- yum! 

But I'm not letting go of the scooter Santa brought me.

I hope you had (or are having) a lovely Christmas Day. 

God bless you.

a day on the harbour

If you’re looking for the first post in this trilogy, you can find it here.
The second post can be found here.

Thanks for sticking with me -- I know many non-Sydney-siders appreciate the photos of our beautiful city. And I’ve shown you only a few of the vast number taken! ;-)

After a lovely buffet breakfast at our hotel, WM and I checked out and left our bag with the concierge to take advantage of the beautiful weather. We caught a ferry from Darling Harbour to Circular Quay. This photo of the ferry arriving at the wharf was taken the previous morning from our balcony. The vessel in the background is moored outside the Maritime Museum which we have never visited.

Coming into Circular Quay, we saw this massive cruise ship, the Carnival Spirit. You can only get an idea of its size when you see it with the Harbour Bridge and/or the Opera House in the background.

Sailing away from Sydney Harbour, the buildings looked like they were falling! Funny how our eyes play tricks on us sometimes, isn’t it? The building with the curved facade (on the left of the photo, behind the ferry) was the first skyscraper in Sydney – at fourteen stories it dwarfed all the other buildings for years! When I was in (junior) high school, it cost 20c to travel to the observation deck at the top of the building!
  
This iconic building in its beautiful setting needs no introduction, does it? (That cruise ship still looks enormous, even from this distance!)

And this must be one of the most well-known pictures of Sydney!
   
We decided to go from there to Watsons Bay but, being summer, school holidays and a Saturday, found the place way to crowded so we didn’t stay long.
When we got back to Circular Quay, we decided to avoid all the crowds and catch the ferry back to Darling Harbour and go home! I could see WM was disappointed with that decision, so we got off the ferry at Balmain East, where we sat in the shade (it was very hot and we both had been sunburnt but weren’t aware of it yet) in a small park, close to the wharf. it was so nice to be away from the crowds (you can see we are really not city people!). I lay on the hard park bench, WM took yet more photos. The first is of Sydney Observatory.

The next photo is of an historic area of Sydney, known as The Rocks, site of the first British settlement. This is a less well-known, less tourist-y part of The Rocks. The area in front, where the excavators are, is known as Barangaroo, and is under development. There is to be public park and, I’m told, another casino. Given that this is Australia Day, the 226th anniversary of the landing of the First Fleet in Sydney Cove in 1788, this photo is very appropriate.

The last photo is of the ferry (we had been on previously) going back out of Darling Harbour (passing the park in Balmain East) into the harbour proper. That’s the Barangaroo development in the background,
   
Around 3pm, we suddenly realised we were hungry so caught the ferry back to Darling Harbour and found somewhere to have a nice salad for “dinner”.  All too soon it was time to collect our bag, catch the tram to Central station and a train heading west. We arrived home at 6:30pm, tired but happy. It had been a great few days but we were in no hurry to visit the city again for a while!
I hope you’ve enjoyed these posts; this last one finished like a primary school composition (“What I Did on the Weekend”)!
Normal crafting posts will resume shortly.
Happy Australia Day to all my fellow Aussies!

a romantic getaway

warning: long, photo-heavy post!
Last week, WM and I were away from home for a couple of days. Although we live in the outer suburbs of Sydney, we rarely visit the city itself. We decided that for our anniversary (3 December) and Christmas gifts to each other, we would play tourist in our own city.

WM finished work at 2:15 on Thursday afternoon and by 3:30 we were on a train heading to the city. We had booked a one-bedroom apartment overlooking Darling Harbour which is, in itself, part of beautiful and extensive Sydney Harbour. This map shows the extent of the harbour – it is thirty kilometres (19 miles) from the heads on the right to the weir in Parramatta. The city itself is where the words “Circular Quay” are written on the map.

The view from our room was of Sydney skyline looking directly across Darling Harbour


or north along Darling Harbour towards “the Bridge”

Yes, Carol, that is artwork, done in pebbles as far as we could tell from four floors above!

We walked into the city to have dinner in a revolving restaurant at the top of Sydney’s tallest building (the tower seen in the photo of the city skyline). The food was great, we tried most things on the buffet (small samples only) and the company fantastic but the real reason to be there was the views of Sydney and beyond. The weather had been very warm, 30°C (88°F) plus for over a week, so there was a lot of haze. The windows were not as clean as they could be (salt laden winds) and the reflections of the inside of the restaurant in the enormous windows didn’t make for great photography but I’ll share some of the better ones with you.

The first is looking towards North Sydney. The circular building in the foreground was the tallest building in Sydney in 1969. The big windows at the top are outside a revolving restaurant (although I’m not sure if it still operates given the number of taller buildings around it now).

And here it is by the time we came around again, about 45 minutes later.

The next photo is the view across Darling Harbour towards our hotel, which is in the top right of the photo with the triangular shaped light on top of it!

You can see our hotel more clearly in this photo, it’s the building that says “The Star” (Sydney's only casino, and no, we didn’t go near the gambling facilities). We were in the end of the building closest to the centre of the photo. (Sorry about the reflections from inside the restaurant!)

The next photo shows a ferry just coming into the part of the harbour known as Darling Harbour, which is where our hotel was located.

This a photo looking towards The Heads – the entrance to Sydney Harbour. Outside is the Pacific Ocean (well, officially the part of it known as the Tasman Sea, between Australia and New Zealand). In 1770, Lieutenant James Cook sailed past these heads and noted that there was an entrance to a “small harbour” – little did he know what was really hiding inside that small opening! The vintage etching shows the true size of that “small” harbour”!


We chose to go for dinner so that we would be there for sunset (romantic except, perhaps, when you're sharing dinner with a camera and a blog). You can see the light is fading fast. This is a view over the eastern suburbs as they catch the last rays of the sun. Those tall buildings in the background are at Bondi Junction, which is very close to the world-famous Bondi Beach.
  
A block away from the shopping complex on which the tower is built, is Hyde Park (named after the place of the same name in London). On the other side of Hyde Park is St Mary's (Catholic) Cathedral. I wanted to get married there when I was a teenager; it has the longest aisle I have ever seen and I had visions of Julie Andrews as Maria heading towards the Captain in the wedding scene from The Sound of Music! Alas, no long train for me! My dress was much simpler. When I was a young teenager, the cathedral has no spires, they were added in 2000.

The green circle on the left of the next photo and the white circular ‘building’ on the right of the photo are temporary, they are part of the Festival of Sydney which runs over sixteen days in January (summer break here). The green circle holds an inflatable full-size replica of Stonehenge called “Sacrilege”; it’s pretty big, look at the size of people next to the ‘stones’.
 
So, to finish our photos from the Sydney Tower Buffet Restaurant, one of the shots of the sunset that we managed to get; looking over Darling Harbour. Our hotel is the one with the big blue light area in the centre of the photo; that’s the Sky Terrace rooftop bar in action for the Festival of Sydney.
   
It was a warm night when we came down from the restaurant at about 9:00 so we decided to wander over to Hyde Park and see what was happening. WM was, as usual, taking arty shots but I was entranced by the guitar playing of this young man whom I had never heard before.

His name is Tom Ward and yes, his guitar really is as battered as it looks. We bought a CD and tried to say something intelligent but you know how it is when you’re awestruck by someone’s brilliance. Hop over to his website and listen as he performs his own composition on Australia’s Got Talent. I’d offer you a video from YouTube but I think this post is long enough all ready!
On our way back to the hotel, we passed the Hermès shop and two of the windows caught our attention. The first contained these old skis and poles; the second contained these kangaroos made from torn (cotton) paper by Anna-Wili Highfield. I thought they were amazing! (Take a moment to go over to her website and look at her works – stunning!)

 
So that’s it for the first few hours of two and half days! I guess there’ll be another post later!
See you then in our amazing city!

December and 2012 review

 During the second half of this year, I decided to focus my attention on a small number of projects (maximum 7) and not allow myself to be distracted by my UFOs or enticing new projects.

This is my progress during December which shows that I really do work best when I have a short list of projects to focus on!

1. The Very Hungry Caterpillar quilt (finished)
2. Christmas Tree wall-hanging (finished)
3. Cardigan for Me (some progress)
4. Purple Dropped Stitch Scarf (finished)
5. Merlot Toe Up Sock (finished)
6. appliqué blocks (finished)
7. Scrappy Rainbow “hearts and four-patch” quilt (some progress)

I knew there was no way that I would have that cardigan or quilt finished in December; as long as I am making progress, I'm happy.

Here's the final photo of the Purple Dropped Stitch Scarf  -- taken before it was washed and dried to soften it up.

Nitty-Gritty (for those who like such things)
yarn: Panda Magnum 8ply (DK) 100% acrylic; used all but two metres of the 310 in the skein!
purchased at H. Fay and Sons, Bingara
needles: 4.00mm Aero circulars (60cm long) - purchased at David Jones at least 30 years ago!
time taken: 14 days
length and width of scarf: 6" x 72"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The short "focus list" came into being after I published a list of twenty-six WiPs  -- some quilting, some knitting. That was June and I was overwhelmed by the number of things I was trying to work on.

I have come to realise that the longer I leave a project the less likely it is to get finished -- which I guess is probably true for everyone!


To keep it "short", this is a list of the UFOs and WiPs I carried into 2012, and the progress I made on them; plus the projects I started during 2012 which are not yet finished. I have not included the 55 projects I started and finished during 2012 (85% of them knitted).

1. piano cross stitch (started 1995) – UFO
2. Stealth Knitting Project (started January 2010) – UFO
3. Ambassador of Love mittens (started March 2011) – UFO
4. Country Houses Quilt (started May 2011) – UFO
5. Lace Infinity Scarf (started June 2011) – frogged August 2012
6. sideways baby jumper (started November 2011) – UFO
7.  Safari Cloth Book (started November 2011) – finished October 2012
8. curtains (started November 2011) – embarassingly -- UFO
9. Scrappy Strings quilt (started November 2011)  – UFO
10. Rainbow Scrap Challenge applique heart blocks (started October 2011) – finished December 2012
11. Rainbow Scrap Challenge four patch blocks (started November 2011) – worked on the last couple of months, so a work in progress
12. Rainbow Scrap Challenge nine patch blocks (started November 2011) – worked on the last couple of months so a work in progress
13. Rainbow Scrap Challenge string blocks (started November 2011) – worked on the last couple of months so a work in progress
14. Rainbow Scrap Challenge improv blocks (started November 2011) – worked on the last couple of months so a work in progress
15. Rainbow Scrap Challenge Wonky Window blocks (started November 2011) – worked on the last couple of months so a work in progress
16. purple Cocoon socks (started September 2011) – I can’t make up my mind whether to knit or frog – UFO
17. soft blue socks (started September 2011) – finished July 2012
18. Merlot toe up socks (started September 2011) – finished December 2012
19. intarsia blanket (started November 2011) – finished November 2012
20. Tina’s baby blanket (started January 2012) – frogged July 2012
21. Super Secret Project for Ben (started February 2012) – UFO
22. Dotty Bright (started April 2012)  – made it to the quilting frame but nothing ever happened – UFO
23. Scrappy Log Cabin (started April 2012) – no action (only thought) since June – UFO
24. sampler quilt (first block cut May 2012) – never really got off the ground so it’s not really a WiP or a UFO, in 2013 it will be like a new project!
25. donated partial scrappy string quilt #1 (started May 2012) – UFO
26. donated partial scrappy string quilt #2 – no longer exists, it has been reclaimed as scraps for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge – frogged November 2012
27. hexagon project bag (started in September) – work in progress
28. Deb’s Diamond blanket (started November 21) – work in progress
29. Westall Cardigan (started 27 November) – work in progress

During 2012, I finished a total of 60 projects; three projects were frogged, one project never got started, eight remain works in progress and ten have slipped into being UFOs (I think six months without any action is long enough to call them unfinished objects)! 


That's twenty two projects being carried into the New Year! And twelve of those were started before 2012!

It's not a long list but, for the sake of my sanity, 2013 needs to be “The Year of the Finished Project”!

adding to the stash (again)

I’m still on a yarn and stash diet. I haven’t fallen off the wagon. My rule was that I could buy any yarn or fabric as long as it had a specific (short term) purpose. There should be no adding to the stash just because I love something, or because it’s on sale.

I have not broken the rules with my most recent purchases.

Firstly, there was this fabric for my niece’s baby’s play quilt. All except the solid are from The Very Hungry Caterpillar range of fabrics.

The left photo is a glimpse of the top which I have finished and the right is the backing fabric (to be used in conjunction with the spots and solid).

The green in this photo is the backing and sashing fabric I have chosen to go with my Christmas Tree embroideries and the waves fabric is to be the backing for a cushion/pillow which I’m making as a gift.

I won these two sweet Japanese fabrics in a give-away on Val’s blog.

Val also included this little handbag charm – how cute! I didn’t see it until I went to take the photos today so a special thank you, Val, and please forgive me for not mentioning it in my email to you.

Carol, at FunThreads, sent me this little package of fabric for the I Spy quilt I plan to make for my grandsons. Thank you so much, Carol. It was very kind of you.

This is Older Grandson’s favourite fabric square.

I’d better move that I Spy quilt up the “to do” list, I think!

As for the yarn, I have purchased only two 100g skeins.

Yes, I know it’s acrylic and I said I wasn’t buying any more acrylic but I have a bag full of acrylic yarn to use up and a great idea in mind, so I purchased these two because they were on sale and because they were colours I didn’t already have in my collection.

I didn't buy this yarn but it is now in my stash. It is 100g of Crazy Zauberball – a yarn for making matching socks becasue two strands of yarn are placed alongside each other and dyed together -- giving a perfect match!

This was the prize for the most popular item in the One Skein Challenge at our knitters’ guild meeting last month. Thanks to all the members who voted for my Extended Swallowtail Shawl.

Time to get back to those WIPs  that I mentioned in my last post! One is now finished so there should be a celebratory post soon!