Sunshine-y Day

Sadly the sun is starting to set for today :-( but the sun today reminds me that winter is beginning to wind to a close and (hopefully) I will have a few nice months before the full heat of summer arrives.

Sunday morning I headed back to Ballarat to hang out with my parents and Darwin (and various other pets). A friend of mine is currently packing up her life and preparing to head overseas. I caught up with her on Fri and Sat and both days we spent some of our conversation discussing spring cleaning and how much stuff we seem to have accumulated over time. I have been thinking about having a good clean out of everything for awhile as our household will be expanding next year. I also remember the ridiculous accumulation of stuff that we had to clean out of our last rental property and I don't want our current place to be the same.

I began by going through some of the stuff stored in my old room at home. I came up with a few items that I can easily part with....looked hopelessly at a pile of things that I am not yet ready to part with but have no real everyday use for.

Then I got started on a project that Mum and I came up with a few months ago when we were cleaning out her fabric stash. The first stage of the process looks like this -

The project is a rag rug. These two balls are made up of cut up strips of old clothes and the un-usable scraps of fabric in my stash that I could never bring myself to throw out. I probably half way through joining all the fabric and clothes that I already have for this project before I start attacking my wardrobe for more items to cut up.......

While I was searching through things I found some VERY OLD craft projects of mine -

This is probably my first attempt at crochet (which I now can't remember how to do) from either the summer before or after Year 12 (which is ten years ago now - yikes). I also found three nice sized balls of wool with these squares so maybe I will finish making something from this.

I also found these squares which I think I started at some point in the middle of high school.

In need of some desperate blocking but I was interested to see that my tension had settled down by this stage in time. Not sure what I will do with them - maybe sew them into the learn to knit afghan that I started at the beginning of the year and put aside in a huff after about four squares.

Well better push on with the rest of the days tasks.

Cooking, dress cutting and Christmas bunting

I managed to go home to Ballarat for a few days this week, chiefly for my Dad's birthday but also to do some sewing and spend time with the parents and Darwin. Dad's birthday was a very quiet family dinner and Mum made an awesome roast and chocolate pudding.

First I finally succeeded in washing the black fabric and getting it dried without bird presents on it. So I cut out the fabric and then gave the pattern to Mum to figure out…..its about half finished at the moment but don’t think I will get home until after Christmas.

I found this fabric in the remnants pile at Spotlight for $1 a piece. Pretty cool I thought and perfect for making some drawstring bags to give as present.

As we are having Christmas day at my house in Melbourne I decided to make some Christmas bunting as decoration. I haven’t really bothered to collect Christmas decorations previously as I always go home for Christmas and I would rather make than buy so I started with the bunting. Not sure that I will be making anything else this year, it might need to be a slow collection of things.

To make quick bunting I used pinking shears to cut the edges. These are my Mums pinking shears (with the original and very cool box).

This is Mum's bunting all pinned and ready to be sewn.

And this is Mum sewing bunting in the studio.....all of the sewing ended up like this with me handing things to Mum as she sewed and then wandering around stealing yarn from her stash to make birthday presents and more stitch practise squares.

Now I am off to work on a beanie for a friend for his birthday.... I told him he may need to wait six months before it is finished.