...calendars - the Advent kind

For the past 6 or 7 years (with the exception of one) I haven't decorated for Christmas. It seems such a pointless exercise when we usually leave for our annual cross country trek to visit families and at least a week before Christmas and arrive home again long after the festivities have passed. Walking into a decorated house a week into January is like turning up in fancy dress at a party where they canned that idea.

And my lack of decorations makes me a bit sad. The one year I did decorate I made bunting, we bought a tree and I have mug rugs and placemats. They are all store carefully in the cupboard. There is a Christmas quilt for the spare bed (ours is still under construction!) and there are all sorts of others bits and pieces to be scattered around. I miss them when I don't put them up.

 So this year I decided on a happy medium of an advent calendar. Happily earlier this year Rachel and I agreed to fill each others Advent calendars. I committed to make mine, she already had one made a few years ago but it had only recently resurfaced, you can read the tale here.

I made it of my own design - the pockets are envelopes lined with 25 different Christmas fabrics. They took awhile but I think are worth the effort. I finished the calendar Saturday night - not quite in time for our filler swap. It made finishing the binding a little more tricky!. I am happy though that I had it hanging by Saturday night. Since them I have been waiting to have time and light at the same time for some good photos and tonight I get sick of waiting!

We decided to fill the weekend days with some sewing and crafting goodies and the weekdays with a chocolate treat. Everyday has a challenge - either a task or a photo theme. I'm posting my photos to Instagram here. (if anyone can tell me how I can show Instragram pics in this post I'd be most appreciative)

Three days in and I am having lots of fun - the challenges Rachel has set for me a open to many different interpretations and you can't complain about a daily treat!

...I don't see why Santa can't drive a truck and take a passenger

The first block of the 12 Days of Christmas Quilt Along.

Started in a whim on the basis of this block.

Not a one holiday wonder!

Looking for the Flood Relief Auction? It's here.

When I took the Green Bag Challenge I fully intended to wrap all my gifts from that point forward in reusable cloth bags... and I fully expected to do the Christmas presents and Mum's birthday present and from there i would inevitably revert to the speed and convenience of wrapping paper, while feeling guilty every time I did.


But with some friends due tomorrow and a Christmas present (a late one to be sure but on time for our schedule, I promise) I made a little zippered bag to package the said gift.

This friend like blue so I literally tipped by blue scrap jar out on the sewing table next to the machine and made the front panel by improv piecing a quilt as you go rectangle, lined it with some blue dots and used a scrap of linen for the back. The zip was in the box of random zips.

I'm so proud of me....how long can I keep it up I wonder?

Tis the season...

I started this post a long time ago. And needed only pictures to finish it but as it the way with this time of year visitors, cooking and other activities meant that did not happen. So I have edited it a little, added  the pictures and now it is good to go!

.... for trying to finish up all my grandiose plans.

I like making gifts for people but around Christmas time the sheer volume of them if I chose to make them for everyone would put me in the seriously crazy group. So I bought giftsb but, inspired by this post from Sew Mama Sew and some of the great links they provided  in this post and this post I am making wrapping in the form of reuseable bags. I started by sending one off to my friend in our freindship group's (Not so Secret) Santa made from a pattern from the Lunch Bags! book.

I made the quilted drawstring bag, the last project in the book. I used a Kokka Linen and cotton blend for the outside and a simple solid for the drawstring closure. The batting was normal quilt wadding but you could also use insulbrite to help things stay cool I suppose. I am really happy with how it turned out, less happy with how long it took because I kept making simple mistakes, although sometimes I think the directions could have been a little clearer to prevent that. These unpicking issues also meant it took about and hour longer than it should have to complete and I only just made it in the mail before then end of the day. Hopefully it makes it before Christmas. 

Boyed by the experience I sat down this morning before work and wrote a list of the style of bag that I thought would actually be used by each recipient and would fit the gift. It didn't seem a green option to gift a white elephant. The thing that worked the best in all this planning was that I can make most of these entireley from materials already on hand! 

And here they are, all done.

1. Picnic Bag for Lydia - inside, 2. Picnic Bag for Lydia, 3. Simple Lunch Bag for Dad, 4. Lunch sack forJustin, 5. Bike bag for Mum, 6. For Iva, 7. Grocery bag for Ana, 8. Grocery bag Amy, 9. Lunch bag for Adrianne, 10. Mum's birthday, 11. A book bag, 12. Too cute!

I think this is a tradition to stay.

St Nikoulas Swap

Oh No! this was supposed to post automatically yesterday and there seems to have been a glitch. Please mentally take a step back in time and pretend it is the 6th of December as you read this.

For those of you not from recent Central European descent, like myself, a quick explanation of St Nikolaus/Nicholas/Nikola (St N for short from here) day.

Depending on the country in which you are celebrating the tradition St N's feast day, the 6th of December, is also a day where children are given presents (in the same vein at Santa visiting children who have been good all year) as, among other groups St N is the patron saint of children.

St N and Santa : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Nicholas#Central_Europe

Although this day falls early in the Advent season the gift giving has little to do with Christmas. for children that have not been good they receive, instead a visit from Krampus, he will leave a rod for the children to be disciplined with. Depending on the country or family traditions may of these details, including the date, may be different. Gifts are left in the child's boot, left near a window or some other accessible area.


Krumpus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krampus

In case you are wondering, in the experience of my friends who grew up in these areas this is your gift for this time of the year, Santa doesn't come 3 weeks later.
It just so happens that my partner comes from one of the Central European countries, that he doesn't 'get' gift giving at Christmas times but loves this tradition, and that St N's day also happens to be his Name Day (another long story for another day). So when I saw this swap I wanted to join, I thought about how busy I would be around this time, how many other things I wanted to be making over the last few months and how it might make me really stressed, and then I joined anyway.

It was only a small swap, 14 people and most were from America, as seems to be the case in Flickr swaps. But the person I was making for happened to be the Swap Mama, from Germany.

Which meant a few things, 
1. I couldn't post sneak peaks - Anything I showed my partner would instantly know was for her. 
2. I had to make a decision if I was going to go with the Christmas (St Nicholas American style) theme that was developing or make items I thought my partner would like, not necessarily Christmas-y, which was my understanding of her original plan for the swap. Her inspiration email helped a little, as did some of her early descriptions for the swap. 

I decided to go with a mix of Christmas and everyday, with the focus on everyday. 

So this post is pictures of what I made, for my partner to see. As there was a slight mix-up with the addresses I couldn't post until the last minute and with the distance and the Christmas mail is probably a few weeks away.  Hopefully these pictures will deliver some excitement during the wait.

The first item is a decorative reindeer, from a pattern by Melly & Me.

Hopefully he or she can adorn an area and watch over the Christmas festivities. As my partner has young children I left off the buttons for safety and made the horns a little shorter for durability.

My partner also suggested something for the sewing corner, and I came up with this mat to protect the table from the machine vibrations. 

It has this cute vintage tape fabric for borders on two sides, and plaid style straight line quilting on the machine surface.  

 

The right hand side has a little removable pin cushion that can be removed by undoing the buttons for carrying to the ironing board or cutting table as well as a little pocket some some small snipping scissors.

Hope you like it partner!

The final sewn item is a magic cushion featuring a linen fabric that my partner said she liked to add to the extensive cushion collection she mentioned. The blocks that make up the cushion are reasonable geometric and show off the linen well. It is a large lap size and includes a pocket for folding at the back. This doubles as a great foot warmer when having a little rest under it!

Front



Back

The undone view is a surprise!

The package is all labelled with these cards, I sewed some fabric to some card stock and wrote on the card side.

There are a few little extra bibs and bobs in the envelope as well, so careful when opening!

Now to wait patiently for my own package to arrive. Unfortunately it looks like there will be a little delay on this too but good to know so I don't scare the mailman with my stalking!

Today I feel mostly human again. It has been a little while. It turns out I need sleep, not a huge amount, but enough. And about 10 hours in three days is not enough, not for me anyhow. And getting up at 5:30am to go to work when you got back from the airport at 2am is not going to make for a pleasant work day. I don’t know how parents do it, keeping those sort of hours for years. Perhaps some sort of hormonal cocktail that has yet to be discovered. Whatever it is I could have done with some the last few days.



We did finally get to Perth, and when I say finally it was only about 4 hours later than planned but the knowledge that we had been at the airport in enough time to catch the early flight as planned and when we didn’t that we had gotten up at 4:30am for no reason made it a little hard to swallow. My brother’s wedding was lovely, I’d show a photo, but I didn’t remember to take any. I was also able to catch up with some friends I wouldn’t have otherwise seen until next April. So, a great weekend all round, just tiring.


I did have a list of projects that I wanted to complete last week before we left. I didn’t. But that is OK, because it was making me stressed and a hobby shouldn’t make you stressed, it should relieve it.


So over the last couple of nights, in the hour or two before I got so tired I was likely to sew my finger to the fabric I completed my November block for do. Good Stitches {a Charity Bee}. The founder of this wonderful bee, Rachel, is out Bee Mama for this month and requested we make blocks for a quilt to be given to a very young mother to be who has a baby daughter due in January. Rachel had asked us to choose a particular block in the quilt to complete, with each of the diagonal rows being a slightly different colour scheme so the diagonal rows in the finished quilt would go from tan to yellow, to orange to pink to red. We had free reign with the design of the block, as long as we included and embroidered panel Rachel sent to us.

My panel was 6x3” and I sat on it for a little while as I didn’t want to do another log cabin (it seems to be my fall back design) but couldn’t think of anything else I could do that would include a rectangle design. In the end I though ‘pinwheels’ but know that I would have to piece then differently to normal as the block couldn’t bee all pinwheels (it would be too ‘busy’ and the embroidery would be lost)and they couldn’t be regular and still make the 12.5” block requested. In the end I look my graph paper pad to work and started sketching at lunchtime. I blocked out an area for the panel in an off centre location and then just started drawing pinwheels of different sizes, leaving some gaps. When it finished I was really happy with the layout. I just had to find a way to sew 1” finished pinwheels and work out the fabric.


In the end I made most of the small pinwheels in a larger size and cut them down at the end, with a different yellow print for each size pinwheel. It did make for some fabric wastage, and I am generally not keen on that but it was the only way I could get them done accurately enough. It also really helped with getting the bulk of the units through the machine, considerable at the centres as I had used some linen as well. I then went down to the LQS and bought a solid that blended well with the different yellow prints in the pinwheels. When this was added to the outside of the pinwheels it made the linen rather than the print stand out which I had not considered at the beginning but the overall ‘look’ is still the right colour, I think. It also really helps the panel stand out which I good too, I think.


Tiredness aside, this was a marathon piecing effort with all the different size pinwheels and different prints to cut, about 3-4 hours all up at a guess. I really think, though, that the time was well spent. I really like the modern twist on a traditional look, but I wouldn’t want to make a whole quilt that way!


On the cards this week,


• Mango chutney Note to self: do not fall asleep when making it this time and burn the sugar to the bottom of the pan

• Ginger beer plant from flowerpress (followed by the ginger beer in 9 days)
• Finishing and posting my St Nickolas Swap items (SOON!!)
• Peach and Passionfruit Jam
• Planning for Christmas (including making the pudding and some fruitmince)

• Tracing some patterns for some new summer clothes for myself.


Sometimes I really think I should be a 50’s housewife....

3x6 Holiday block swap

One of the list of projects I mentioned in my last post was blocks for the 3x6 Sampler Quilt Mini Bee.

I will participate in the next quarter of this bee for the first time. In this bee you make six blocks, the the chosen colours of each of your hive members, with the colours being different and the block design being the same. Each quarter lasts for three months and there are four quarters a year (unsurprisingly) and you can drop in and out of the quarters as you workload allows.  

This year there is also a holiday block swap. Send off as many 12.5" blocks as your heart desires and get the same number back.

I had been wanting to try the Three in a Box quilt block designed by Julie Herman from Jaybird Quilts for a little while and thought this was the perfect opportunity.

So I pulled out some Christmas fabric and got cutting and sewing.

I have 16 blocks - the mixed amount I get back should be enough to make a Christmas quilt when I get them. Not really needed in Australia in December but pretty all the same!

Can you spy my mistake block, or as I like to call it, my humility block? I thought about undoing it and resewing it but in a Sampler Quilt I didn't think it was worth the risk tearing the fabric, it is just a different design.

This is my favourite block!

I can't wait to see what appears in the mail in a few weeks. I'm sure it will be great!