Happy New Year!

 Happy New Year Everyone fromMeg, Katie, Pringle, Fudge and Me!

Where has the last year gone? It's true the years do get faster as I get older but I'm looking forward to 2010. What will your New Year Resolution be? I'll have to think on that myself!

I had a lovely Christmas at home with the family with lots of laughter and fun. The photos above were taken on Christmas morning when all 4 dogs went for a frolic in the snow. They love to run and it meant they were quiet and sleepy the rest of the day!

We all had lots of presents to open. I was very lucky and my sackful included 5 new quilting books:

These should keep me busy for a while!

I got lots of other wonderful things including a new camera to replace my old one which finally gave up on me 2 weeks before Christmas. Yesterday I got another toy to play with partly funded from my saving and partly from my Mother-in Law who sends a cheque for us all to share - Thanks Jean!

Yes - a Go Cutter, wow! I've been playing with it and had a go at cutting all the shapes I ordered - tumblers, apple cores, rag squares and 'chisels' plus the standard squares and triangles included. It's going to be a real stash buster I think. Here is the result of and hour and a quarter with a pack of 21 fat quarters which I bought in the USA 2 years ago:

I cut 189 apple core pieces which include little notches in the sides to help with matching. Fantastic!

Today I've been cutting raggy squares from flannel:

These fabrics have also been lurking in the cupboard because I couldn't face cutting all that fringing. Just need to spend more time on the sewing machine now. Guess what I'll be doing New Year's Day!

Wishing you all a very happy and peaceful New Year.

Hazel x

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

to all my friends out there in blogland. Click here for a little treat!

We have woken up this morning to a white Christmas - a very rare thing in this part of the world! Actually we've had snow on the ground for just about a whole week now and it has been pretty cold and icy too. Yesterday we had the most snow and at one time it came down in big fat flakes.

I got out my Flip camera and shot this video in our street:

The children arrived yesterday afternoon along with another 2 dogs (we have 2) and 2 ferrets and my brother will join us for lunch today. What fun!! I hope yours is filled with fun and laughter too.

Indigo Dyeing and Batik

I spent last weekend at college doing some indigo dyeing and batik. The sample above was dyed in indigo after first hand stitching rows of running stitch and gathering. I'd seen some of Janice Gunner's quilts at the recent Knitting and Stitching Show and really like them so I bought her book. This was a method taken straight from that book- Shibori for Textile Artists:
:

Janice created lovely quilts with pieces of fabric like these simply quilted along the pattern lines on the cloth. I made a few different patterns by folding too:

I'll do some quilted samples for my coursework folder but I'd like to make an indigo quilt using several of these pieced together like my friend Anne-Marie did at college last year.

We also had a go at batik. Here are the two samples:

So these need some quilting too. I'll let you know how I get on!

PS I will get round to making my machine applique video - maybe at the weekend!

What a Star!

My son (aged 22)  took up the ukelele over a year ago and has a growing collection of the instruments which I think he plays well. He hadn't really taken any interest in playing music before so it's great to see him having fun with it. He often puts links to Youtube videos on his Facebook page of people playing the Uke but this latest one is amazing and I guarentee will make you smile - enjoy!

Can you believe he's 5 years old and only speaks Japanese?!! Visit this page for more of his videos - be sure to watch 'Obladi Oblada'!

Spot the Difference?

I've started machine stitching my blocks and I'm pretty pleased with them so far. I love the colours and the petals are going together quite neatly although I'll have to try to make the outside ones fit a little more carefully I think.

For the first one I used YLI fine silk thread  on top and a YLI soft touch cotton thread in the bobbin. I used two shades of the silk as i tried to match the petal colours as closely as I could. This wasn't too bad but I thought the stitching showed a little around the edges of the petals so I tried invisible thread on the next one. I used YLI 'Smoke' coloured invisible thread on top and  Soft Touch (white) in the bobbin. I don't think the stitching shows as much with this combination but putting the two side by side at arms length it is difficult to tell them apart! The photo shows the one stitched with invisible thread on the left.

I have used stitch number 3 on my Bernina 440 - this makes 2 straight stitches then one zig zag. I adjusted the width of the stitch right down to 0.5 so it just catches the edge ot the petal as I sew very close to the edge on the background fabric. I have to go quite slowly and concentrate but perhaps I'll get quicker by the time I make the 49th block! I was thinking I might try making a video to show how I do the stitching - would you like to see it demonstrated?

Wednesday Web - Colour Palette Generator

 

I've discovered a really cool web tool which is perfect for picking colours for quilts - a colour palette generator. Just upload a photo like the one above and in a few moments you have a palette like this:

Isn't that brilliant?!! It's free to use at Big Huge Labs  -  BUT before you go read my tip below on resizing photos!

Resizing Photos:
Digital cameras now take photos which are very large files and if you upload these to the internet they take ages. You can resize your photos very easily using a free 'Image Resizer' program from Microsoft which makes uploading photos so much quicker:

1. First download then install the programme from here (scroll down to find 'Image Resizer')
2. Now find the folder where you store your photos
3. Right click on a photo and choose 'resize image'
4. Choose from small, medium or large -I usually use medium
5. Image resizer now makes a copy of your photo at this new size
6. You can resize many photos at once by selecting them all before right clicking and resizing
   

I use it to resize all the photos for my blog and my photos upload really quickly - have a go, its really easy!