Matching Pegs

From the title it may sound as if I am incredibly fatigued, but no, in fact, I am very frustrated.

My little girl is not getting enough sleep - of the daytime variety. She has given up on her nap.

This doesn’t bother her much (until about 5:30pm when she crashes) but it has completely robbed me of time on my own to sew, or blog, or get things done around the house without interruptions. Sigh.

I have tried getting her to have quiet time in her room, but she is a social little creature, and likes to be with me. I have even tried the appeal of new sheets - with hearts on them (we needed some flannelette sheets anyway) but they only worked for one day. My fallback is now a drive in the car on one of those days where she is desperately tired and will not lie down, it works every time. I guess I will have to get used to having company for every minute of the day, except for the one morning when she is at occasional care.

So moving right along. Here is a look at Brittany’s finished fairy, Ta Da!

I had a lot of fun making her, and Amelia tells me that my fairies are improving.

This is one of the fairies (there are 5) on a wall hanging I made Amelia a few years ago.

I purposely drew her with the proportions of a child rather than a grown-up, (Brittany’s fairy is more like a grown up).

She is also a lot more static, which is probably less enchanting.

I rather like this colour combination though, she looks like a fairy who likes water to me.

I think Amelia will be ordering a new fairy any day now.

Things are going along swimmingly with my little fairy (actually Brittany’s little fairy), and my arm is holding up well, as long as I pace myself. This means putting down the needle before I am really ready. My internal dialogue has changed from “only one more piece and I will have finished the dress” to ” only one more piece and I better put it away for the night”. In everything, moderation, seems to be working. I am up to sewing on the dark purple “petals” around the neckline, and then the fairy hair, so I am close to finishing the applique - Woo Hoo.

As the weather gets colder, I am finding it harder to take nice photos for the blog. I am pretty determined to have an image for each post, but I think I will have seize every opportunity to take photos when the sun has come out to play.

Not all of my creating has been sewing/craft related lately. As I have mentioned before, our church is having a wedding gown parade. I have been busy designing interesting flyer’s, tickets and now a board (sponsored by the local real estate agent) to go out the front of our church to advertise the event. A little bit of graphic design has been fun. I used lovely old illustrations of lace garments on the brochure and tickets (from the 1770’s) which were designed to be printed in black and white. The board needed to be a little more eye catching. I found this lovely image on istock photo, and today I saw the board up outside the church.

I don’t kid myself that I am particularily gifted at this, but at least I am not too bad, and I am having fun, while supporting a good cause. It was also exciting to see someting I had done, printed this large.

I had barely sat down to write this post when an almighty noise started. Very heavy hail. We are in the midst of Autumn now, and the weather has really turned. As a Melbournian, I am not going to complain about anything wet falling from the sky. The truth is that I don’t really mind the cooler weather, as long as we get some sun here and there. But the first really cold days always come as a bit of a shock to the system.

Here is a promised photo of the fairy I am going to start stitching - if my arm allows it. This is the first layer, the legs and the bottom wings, as well as Brittany’s Name. It is the front of a library bag.

The fairy will be needle turn, but I have used fusible web for Brittany’s name, which I will blanket stitch around. I can’t wait to pick up the needle and thread in front of the telly tonight.

I am going to jump on the bandwagon with a meme that Claire at Loobylu has started called “The Friday Archive”. Below is a look at a tiny wall hanging quilt I made a few years ago out of a little pack of charm squares that my lovely fellow stitcher friend Kylie gave to me. Each square is only 1 inch. It was made by sewing strips then cross cutting and rearranging them. It ties in with some emails I have been having with Lily. We have both admitted that the actual quilting part of a quilt is not our favourite part of the process.

Because this one is so small, quilting it was actually fun, it was easy to move under the needle. It was my first go at free motion embroidery (if you don’t count experiments on scraps), after purchasing a suitable foot. I did circular roses formed by swirling the quilt in little circles.

I really like the effect, in spite of the fact that the stitch length varies a lot which is certainly not the done thing. This little piece of work brightens up the smallest room in the house.

This little cat and I had a lovely day at Brooke’s 4th birthday party.

I was particularly happy with the gift that we got her. Not having time to make something, I was keen to get a creative gift. I found these great paper cut-outs of people that you can decorate. Put together with some googly eyes and some “Twistable” crayons, just right for a busy 4 year old.

Speaking of presents, here is a little something from Aunty Cookie’s etsy shop that I picked up for my lovely husband to mark our anniversary. I finally picked up a custom cut mount to frame it. This beautiful, whimsical print on linen is called “In the Garden” and not only did I love it, but it also was symbolic of us.

For as long as we have had our own yard, we have had our own veggie plot. Sometimes it only has herbs in it, but we have grown lots of different veggies over the years.

Finally here is a present that I got for myself. The local craft store had DMC floss on sale for only 59cents, so I picked up some colours that I thought would fill the gaps in my colour range as I pictured it in my head. Not a bad haul really.

I did get a chance today to do some sewing preperation - I cut out the intricate applique pieces for my little fairy that you can see in my sketch here, but it was too dark to show you a picture on this post.

Lastly, have a look here at the funniest teatowel I have ever seen.

Can anyone beat that?