Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Welcome Home Dad!

We missed you!
 - For the past couple of weeks, Dad has been in America for work and after a whirl wind adventure all over America, on Saturday morning he arrived home in Melbourne!

While he was in Chicago he found a two storey quilt shop near where he was staying and he brough home a lovely surprise...


Moda layercake Candy Kisses by Sandy Gervais!!!
The fabrics are in gorgeous shades of pink, cream and red; I can't wait to turn them into a beautiful quilt.
Thankyou soo much Dad! :)

It's so good to have you home and we hope you had an amazing time in America! We missed you!

(Charlie did especially)
                                                 
Hope everyone is having a great week

Miranda & Charlie

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Update...

on everything that has been happening in the past few weeks- I know I'm a little bit behind on blogging :)

#1. Spring to Finish Challenge ended a couple of mondays ago! 
 I didn't end up finishing the Fancy free quilt but I am really happy with the progress made on it.
The quilt top is finished and I am now working on finishing the backing- there wasn't enough backing fabric left on the bolt when we bought it so I am adding a border to it and then I just have to quilt it and add binding, so I'm nearly done!...kinda.

#2. I went to a Quilting workshop
It was run by Mariya Water.
It was a long but very fun day and gave me the confidence and inspiration I needed to finish my works in progress. I was a bit worried about whether my machine would be able to cope with free motion quilting but it seemed to cope pretty well, it wasn't always very nice to me, but once we figured out why my machine was making the stitching crazy on the back, then we were all good :)

I also got a new foot pedal which I am sew happy about because my machine now has more than the speeds stop and fast! which has certainly made sewing, especially quilting much much nicer now.

So for the workshop we had to make a quilt sandwhich and with a 3-by-3 grid,  to practise on. The stitching in the grid was what I quilted during the workshop. I left the middle square blank because it was easier to do the outside blocks.
We did swirls and spirals, waves and lines, circles and flowers, stipling, something that looks like teardrops/ muscle shells and lots more, however the hardest of all, I found was quilting in little circles/ pebbles and my circles definitely were never very round... but oh well!
We didn't do very much on stipling and I have been told it is one of the hardest types of quilting so I have been doing lots and lots of practise- drawing and quilting!

   *pictures to come soon!*

#3. I won my first giveaway!!
My new friend Wendy from the Melbourne Modern Quilt Guild had a Giveaway on her blog
Harty Little Peaces to celebrate people from 50 different countries visiting her blog. She was giving away an amazing bundle of Owl-y stationary, that she designed! and guess what??....I won!!
I was so happy and excited because I absolutely love owly things ( I think I may have a bit of an obsession!) and also because I never win anything- I think I went into shock when I found out haha
                   Here is a sneak peak of  what was in the exciting pakage that arrived on Friday...
             * Curtesy of Wendy's blog*
        They are the most adorable little owls and I can't wait to show you what else was in the package! 
Thankyou so much Wendy, I love them!
                        
Hope you are having a wonderful week, and for those in Australia, hope you enjoyed the long weekend :)

Miranda and Charlie

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Sometimes I hate Computers...

This is one of those times!

There is a big update post coming but everytime I try to post it, blogspot comes up with an error and when I go back to my saved post...half of its gone! as you can imagine after spending 45 mins uploading photos and writing the post to then have it disapear is not very nice :(

Anyway sorry for my little rant on why I hate computers today (I think I might go back to writing my posts on paper first) but there is an Update and my first tutoial coming! (when the computer decides to be nice)

Hope everyone else is having more success with their computers,

Miranda & Charlie