Saturday, 31 March 2012

New toys

I've been very extravagant this month and will really need to pull my horns in for the next few months. The first toy that I bought myself was an iPad, something I've been wanting for a long time. I love it. I can see how brilliant and useful it's going to be as an addition to my laptop.

























After my son's experience of breaking the screen on his iPad I decided to go for a really solid case, rather than making one for myself. It's brilliant as it supports the iPad in portrait orientation or landscape. I managed to get one in hot pink which I was rather pleased with.

















Next time I'll tell you about my other extravagance.

Saturday, 24 March 2012

City and Guilds

Here are a few things I've finished for my City and Guilds course. It's good to actually complete something as so often I end up with unfinished samples of the technique we've been learning. I'll try and show you some of those some time as I've learnt so many new techniques over the last seven months.

For most of the techniques we do a sample or two and then go on to design our own piece to make. However, for the machine appliqué class I missed out the simple samples as I've done quite a lot before and went straight on to a more complicated project. As it finishes at about A4 size there were a lot of small pieces to play with. I liked it so much that I decided to go on and finish it. My second assessment project has to be based on appliqué, and I'm just starting to think about that now.

On Thursday we were making boxes. I've made straight sided boxes before but not round, so this was fun to try and luckily everything fitted together really well. I decided to add a tassel to the top to finish it off. One of our assessment pieces has to be a box or container, which we will have to design ourselves, so I'll need to get my thinking cap on about that.

And now, my first assessment piece.

Our first assessment project had to be based around one of the different blocks we'd tried out last term. Following an episode of The Quilt Show with RaNae Merrill I was inspired to try twisted log cabin blocks to make this table centre. It took hours to design and then even more hours to make, and there were many occasions that I'd have willingly thrown it out of the window, but now that it's finished I'm delightedwith the way it's worked. The exciting thing about this sort of design is that you spend hours designing and making the segments, but it's not until you finally sew all of the segments together that you really know what it's going to look like. 


Friday, 23 March 2012

Giveaway

KerryAnne of Shabby Art Boutique is having a giveaway of her gorgeous new book Simply Shabbalicious, and has copies for Australian and overseas winners, so pop over and have a look if you haven't already discovered her pretty and inspiring blog.