Old stuff (again!)

So Matt has the camera with him - and he is in the Nuba Mountains (about 11hrs south of here) - so here's  more old stuff....

This is about the size of a placemat (I made it about a year ago)- and I'm not sure what i'll do with it  - I think the plan is to put it into the centre of a quilt - so to just keep building up around it. Except I think I used up most of that fabric....we'll see.

These are two blocks of what will hopefully in the (probably very) distant future be part of a big quilt for our bed.

Before I owned a sewing machine....

Before I owned a sewing machine, I made this.

It hangs on the wall above my sewing machine, in our sitting room.

(The colours don't look quite right in the photo)

Pencil Roll and Bedroom.

A pencil roll that I made as a present -and  demonstrating why I should not try to sew on fabric with straight lines/patterns on it, but because it's full of pretty colours and patterns I really like it!

We share a bedroom with Potspie and Chop - not entirely by choice - but it means the room that could be a bedroom is a study/TV/book room - and it works out OK actually!  Our house here is L shaped, 4 adjoining rooms, no corridoors, kitchen in separate room outside and a bathroom off the biggest room.

Anyway yesterday we moved a big cupboard out of our room, and rearranged beds  - then I put some letters upon the wall.  They are scrapbooking letters I got in the States a while back.

Potspie's new shirt thing.

It has been a very long time since I made Potspie anything.  So I thought I would.  We go down to Kenya for some meetings tonight, and will be there for a week and half, and it will be colder than here, so the idea is she could wear it over a long-sleeved T-shirt.

I really enjoyed making this - I had gotten stuck-in-a-rut on a quilt (that I think I will just scrap actually!) and had been forcing myself not to start anything new till it was finished.   The result being that not much sewing was happening, such was my unenthusiasm for finishing it!  So, I decided to just leave it and make something fun, quick, and that used lots of nice fabric that I've been a bit paranoid about using 'cos I like it too much and don't want to use it all up, so end up never using it. (How silly is that!) (It doesn't help that being in Sudan I really can't buy 'more of the same', or even cotton print fabric...)

1,2,3.....

1 table top  - new and bigger - (thanks to my skilfull husband)
   The old top supports the new one!

2 loaves of homemade bread  (er.. one got eaten before i could photograph it!)

3 neighbours (who are very smiley but not in photos!)

4 very old pyramids

5 days and this chair WILL be finished (and will be used as a chair instead of dump everything place!)

6 guys on the back of a pickup truck

7 flowers (made into a lavender bag)

8 legs

9 patch (disappearing) made a while ago

10 cookies

Little bag to keep things in and an almost quilt.

This is a present for a friend...

It's a little bag to keep things in. It's kind of reversible.  It looks much better in real life.

At one point I even used a ruler to measure where to 'box' the corners. That's quite an event for me!

This is a quilt top that needs quilting somehow. Not sure how to do it. Might try to do wavy lines (in one direction)  by machine all over it.  Gulp. Not used machine to do that before! (Tying and hand quilting didn't work! )

More stuff I made a while ago so it's getting lumped together in one post :-)

Quilt for Potspie - the first quilt  I finished. There was another one unfinished at this time.  It doesn't have batting, just a double layer of sheet in the middle - (too hot here for batting!)

Quilt for Chops - it looks a bit too 'Christmasy', but he likes it and that's what matters - the Snoopy footballers are some fabric my Mum gave me. This quilt confirmed that I don't like sewing in straight lines so much. (And yes, there's that bed in the background again!)

And this I did when I was about 8.  We made them at school.  :-)

Somewhen, about the same time, my Mum gave me a sewing basket.

I still have it.

I used to love making dolls clothes.

If only cloth could talk ...

Before we were married (or even dating) my husband bought a wall hanging in Kenya.
I think it is made of old saris/scarves or something like that, and is from somewhere like India or Bangladesh -  but I'm not sure...
I think it is made from whatever colours they have and is then dyed (in this case red).

At first I didn't like it but more recently I've been looking at it more closely, wondering who wore these different pieces of cloth and what the story of the fabrics in it is. Now I really like it!
If only cloth could talk...

Quick Quilt

Well I spent alot of time looking at the Quilt Festival Quilts (so many really nice ones - lots of inspiration - i had lots of fun looking!) .... then internet went down ..... then power cuts... finally here I am again!

This week I made an quilt for a 'sudden' baby shower.  I had planned to make a little quilt for this baby, but had to accelerate my plans rather quickly!

It was fun to make as I never made one so quickly or simply!  However there are a gazillion things that I would change/do differently next time I make one like this - mainly to do with machine sewing.

I was pleased how the binding turned out as I did the 'make your own bias binding' thing.
The animal /spotty fabric is Ikea (again)(bought when we were in the states this summer). I appliqued some of them on and the others are just the fabric.
These are my favourite drivers!

Quilt Festival

So there is an online quilting festival and you are supposed to post your favourite quilt.  Not sure if your s'posed to post it now or later... but I figured now was OK.

Here's mine.  It's a present for my brother and his wife's baby (due fairly soon). I've only made 4 quilts so didn't have many to choose from!

I made it here (Sudan)- took it with us to the UK and then the US in a bag, then posted it from the US to where he lives in Japan.  Can't post it from here  as it would never make it to Japan, and US is cheaper than UK!

The animals were cut out from some IKEA fabric.

The surrounding fabric was whatever I could find that I thought would work.  A couple of shirts, T-shirts, jellabiya material (material you buy here to make a dress thing for guys here to wear), some fabric Matt got me when he went to Kenya, and various other bits and pieces bought in the US and UK.

Sandwiched in the middle is a white cotton sheet as you can't buy batting here.  Actually I like how flexible and 'comfy' it feels with no batting.

The backing is a sheet.

I 'handquilted' (sewed as i don't know how to 'handquilt' really)  around the animals/squares with different coloured embroidery threads.  I like how it looks on the back - but my photos of the back weren't very successful.

(In case you're wondering, the photos were taken on our washing line in our yard - and it's entirely normal to have a bed in your yard here.)

Things I've made..