HELLO MOJO

You're back.

canvas 16" x 12"
This canvas will look better once the fabric is stretched. If only I could figure out where I put my staple gun!

I'm not sure I'll make many of these for my market stall, quite fiddly and time consuming.

MOJO

It's a funny word and a funny thing. It disappears then can slowly make it's way back or comes back with a bang!

For the last week I seem to have lost my mojo, it's resting and I'm okay with that. I know it will be back, I feel it starting to emerge as the ideas start to poke their heads through my ultra busy life once again.

I cleaned up my sewing room in readiness for my mojo to return and when it does, I will be ready for it.

Take care readers, I will be back soon xxx

RUMOUR HAS IT

This is going to be the name of my new quilt. I absolutely love Adele's song called Rumour Has It and with all of the word fabric in this quilt I've decided to name it after her song. I've been collecting fabric with words, music, numbers etc on them for ages and now I'm finally making a quilt from them.

Here is what I'm working on for the borders.

This quilt is for me, I feel like I haven't made myself anything for ages.

HERE'S THE THING.......

With the Accuquilt machine and dies doing the rounds on lots of blogs, I decided that I really could use one especially with the hand problems I am developing lately with lots of cutting. I haven't managed to win one, so I saved up some money to buy one instead. It took a lot of research to find the dies at the cheapest price and to find cheap postage was close to impossible due to the weight of these dies.

Then it was time to price the machine itself. Wow!!!! Even when I found one at a reasonable price I was certainly not willing to part with the postage money. Then I had a thought, why couldn't I just use my Big Shot for the dies?

I googled and found my answer thanks to a couple of bloggers who had wondered the same thing. Yes I could use the Accuquilt dies in the Big Shot if I was willing to make an alteration to the dies. I thought about this and thought it was well worth the saving to alter the dies, it wasn't going to affect the performance of the dies so I gave the idea of buying the machine the shove, ordered my dies and patiently waited for them to arrive.

You see Accuquilt have been very sneaky in making their dies a 1/4" wider than Big Shot dies so you can't fit them into your Big Shot, therefore making you buy their machine for their dies. I wasn't buying that and when I received my dies yesterday, I took them around to my father in law and asked him to dock the dies. He said that his circular saw would be able to do that and they only took a few minutes each to do.

So now my dies are altered and I can go about cutting my fabric really quick and easily. I've been cutting 6 layers at a time, there's a little bit of waste but I will use that up in other projects and my hand is definately thanking me for it.

I can't wait to try out the rest of my dies and I've saved myself around $200 by thinking outside the square.

COMBI LOVE

GOING BACK TO WHAT I LOVE

For those of you who are relatively new to my world, I have been thread sketching for a number of years. I love these little works of art and enjoy the whole process of preparing, stitching and then making something from the work.

Lately I've found I've been making less and less using this technique but I'm always itching to make up a new design to try out. I guess that making the baby items for my market stall seem to take up most of my sewing time and being for babies, I don't use raw edge applique for obvious reasons.

After the last market on the weekend I realised there are more and more people doing what I do in our local market community (I used to be the only selling these products down here). I'm not saying this is deliberate as some of my designs are from patterns but most are from my own designs. I realise I don't have the right to stop others from making whatever they want and if they see my work around the traps and decide to make and sell their version, well all I can do is keep changing and evolving and coming up with other ideas.

A fellow stall holder makes some similar things to me (Hi Rebecca!!) Her style is different to mine and her work is just gorgeous, I think we actually compliment each other and we have similar tastes in fabrics also.

So I'm getting back to what I love doing, designing, using raw edge applique and thread sketching as well as some children's products, but not as many.

I had so much fun designing these combi vans last night. I'm a huge combi lover!!!!!

Once again for those who are newer to my blog, here are some previous works I've made to sell and swap using this technique.

Thanks for listening to my little rant. Onwards and Upwards I say.

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE MARKET

It's been a huge day, I tried to cram as much craft as I could into it. I made 4 notebook covers, 4 rows of bunting (2 girl & 2 boy) and some more felties, then my neck and shoulders hurt so much that I had to stop.

It's time for bed so I can get up bright and early for the market in the morning.

WHAT A WEEK!!!!

I seriously couldn't have picked a worse week to completely stuff up my neck and shoulders!!! I've been to my chiropractor guru 3 times this week already, everything is inflamed and oh so sore to touch.

I have not been able to do any machine sewing at all and I have a really big market on Sunday. I hope I have enough stock but quite frankly there is nothing I can do about it anyway.

So all I have managed to do is a little bit of hand sewing while sitting rather gingerly on the couch. I'm sewing from this cute book.

All of my other ideas have gone out the window for this month sigh.....