Random Sunday Rundown

Cake shot.  Check.

Gosh, I'm feeling so Masterchef-ie.  Cake decorating is not one of my skills.  I STRUGGLE regardless of my other creative endeavors!  But I'm quite happy with how this one turned out.  Unfortunately the handle wouldn't stay nicely curved and ended up being refined into a slightly lopsided square handle before the party started - but the kids weren't bothered by it.

Birthday girl

Action shot just after the candles went out

Now, onto more interesting fabric sort of matters.  Last weekend I visited my favourite quilt shop (The Country Yard) and bought... really exciting cream fabric!

And really exciting black mottled fabric!

OK - so no prizes for creativity here, but now that I have some more cream, I can turn these uneven nine patch blocks...

into more circles...

And finally into some more of these...

One of these blocks are not like the others... Sesame Street flashback

And the black fits nicely into this mix of fabrics destined to become The Groove Quilt.

I had to do a closeup of the light fabric above - it's a grid pattern!

 And this is what it's all going to turn into...

Remember this one?  Well I've been waiting for the considerable fabric required to sort itself out.  Now I just need to get my A into G and try cutting all those millions of pieces.

 I also visited Spotlight and bought a couple of metres of Denyse Schmidt's DS Fabric line that is stocked exclusively in NZ and Australia by Spotlight (I understand) which was on special (only $8.00/m).

This was added to my slowly growing DS pile:

Slightly retro - but oh, so cool. This pile is going to be fun.

Yesterday I started my challenge entry for The Country Yards exhibition.  We were issued with 9 precut fusible backed shapes cut from the new Stof line of fabrics and given the instructions to make whatever you want under 20" in size, using as many of the shapes as you want.

Here we have the small and medium stars and the medium heart.  These shapes didn't make the cut!  For some reason the reds didn't play nicely with the other shapes, and even though the grey star played nicely, there just wasn't the space for it to fit.

  

This is the small and medium circles

This is the large circle (which I cut the centre out of) and the small heart

The large heart

and the large star (see I'm pretty good with shapes too! all that 70's Sesame Street must have had some sort of impact on my learning)

Now, I'm going to warn you that if you don't want to see how it is all going together... don't scroll down any further.  I'll even leave you a bit of a gap...





now was that big enough?  There was never any doubt that I would make a wall hanging.  I'm not much into bags (or anything else that's not a quilt).  The pieced blocks are 5" - which meant that because I'm not a miniatures expert either, the blocks were destined to be simple.  I think it suits the other simple shapes.

I really should have cropped this!

 It's a little bit of Gail Pan, a little bit of Pat Sloan and a little bit of me.  I have blanket stitch to do... when don't I?? and the final assembly, quilting and binding.  I'm not really making this with any hope or dream of winning.  But I do hope that those people who matter look at it and think of me :0)  and it's a great bit of fun.  Then I'll be quite happy to have it hanging in my studio.