Some yearnings

I have a few little shakers of various types - a silver sugar caster, and some salt shakers. I put my cinnamon in one so I can shake it in a nice fashion over my yoghurt, honey and mango.

But isn't this a rather yummy looking little cupboard and an even lovelier collection!
It belongs to quilt designer Anne Sutton and I found it on The All People Quilt site.

It is a site filled with all sorts of time-wasting pages...
Oh, and you can sign up so they will send you some more ideas every week thereby causing even more time to vanish.

You were warned.


I think this is also from the same place (ie BH&G All People Quilt). I deleted the link so I can't totally credit it, and another day will vanish if I go looking for it...

ThANK YOU Susie!!! She found the link to the quilt:

http://www.allpeoplequilt.com/antiquequilts/antique-quilts_ss2.html

Click on it to have a good look!!

But it is an old (1930's era) quilt in the top photo and a modern reproduction underneath.

I like the brighter old quilt much better. The modern quilt looks gloomy I reckon.

Very cute little Nine Patches with that curved sort of sashing  in between the blocks.
Be a good setting if you had a collection of Nine Patches from a swap.
Especially if they were tiny blocks...











This is a really nice idea for my bathroom.
REALLY nice!

I will post some photos of my current bathroom one day. When I get brave enough to show you.
It is a temporary bathroom. It isn't going to be temporary forever. If it was then it wouldn't be temporary, would it?

I DO really like the idea of a quilted tiled bathroom, however.

Shall have to collect more old tiles. I have some lovely old blue and white antique ones that have been around here for a long time. So this is an idea I have had for about 20 years. I haven't even had a temporary bathroom for anywhere near that long!




Incidentally - have you noticed how much easier it all is to post now? Blogger Fairies have been even busier whilst I was busy last week  and done all sorts of lovely things.
It is so much quicker to post and edit - look at uploading photos for starters!
However, I am still getting used to what it looks like. My Preview hasn't turned out like the original posting looks and I came back to re-edit and it is just getting even more all over the place.

Better finished that perfect. My quilts are like that.

Life...

Life... We would be a bit stuffed if we didn't have Life but geez it DOES get in the way sometimes.

This past week has been so busy.

Dad's funeral was on Wednesday.
Here we are (some of us) at the pub for a little wake after. There are a lot of boys on that side of the family!
Got to meet The Sweetheart's little sister for the first time (she isn't in the photo). Of course the family have known her marginally but she wasn't really a big part of this side of the family. Seems to have been actively discouraged from knowing her Dad.
She is only 23 - Dad remarried when he was 65...
She is gorgeous, tall and with a smile that lights her face and half the world - even though she was so distraught at the funeral for the Dad she never got to know. And she is living in Melbourne, last year at University (Industrial Design which is what my Baby Brother studied. And at the same place, too).



 On Thursday The Beezs came back to visit. They had a gig on Friday night at The Palais in Hepburn Springs which unfortunately turned acoustic when The Palais sound system went very ill. They were fabulous though and JUST what we both needed to cheer us up after a sad week.
They stayed a few days before heading to their last gig in Australia for this tour. They will be back in 2012. I shall let you know when their next gig is. Or check their website for Northern Hemisphere dates.

I got up one morning and Trevor seemed to be missing. Then he poked his little head out from a nest he had made in the couch cushions. Right in between them.
That dog certainly is a worry!
He did look very sweet however.

And look at that Chook cushion. She is wearing purple Doc Martens like I do and has a secret pocket in her wing that sometimes has treasures in it...Easter eggs for example.



Then Saturday we drove four hours to Albury to have a housewarming party for S2 and his Beloved. And it was also my Biggest Little Brother's 50th birthday. S2 and his Beloved cooked a great meal and we ate and had a lovely time. Except I forgot to take all my lovely drugs and found just how effective those pain killers are. Even panadeine every couple of hours didn't do anything nice for me. Got home last night and immediately gobbled my dose. Can't believe how much pain they do indeed kill!

Three quilts went north - a Housewarming Quilt for S2 and his Beloved, and a Birthday Quilt for my darling handsome Bro, and another Quilt that S2 made when he was 18. Actually, they are only tops so far...

The photos for all that partying etc are on The Sweetheart's camera, and we shall have to wait until  he downloads and sends them to me. I will add them later. Or sooner...

Got back Sunday afternoon in time to watch the Australian Grand Prix - poor Mark Webber, when is he ever going to have a proper podium? Or ten would be even better...

I am going to close my Blogaversary Give-away tomorrow night (Eastern Aussie D.S. Time) so hop in for it if you haven't entered

I got this idea from my friend Lisette at Textile Seahorse
Do have a look at her blog - she does such very clever textile creations.
Such an easy entry when my mind is otherwise occupied!


Watching :: my step
Reading :: just about everything - get 15 books each week from the library, half of them junk food for the brain, the rest are highly nutritious
Making :: my mind up (often...)
Eating :: icecream, mixed berries, red jelly, King Island cream and crumbled meringue on top.
Feeling :: sad about Dad dying yesterday
Thinking :: thinking about his amazing first 15 years at the Paris End of Collins st with a famous artist creative mother
Hoping :: I find more photos of her like this one
Wondering :: how Dad managed to have two war records with slightly different names and slightly different birthdates (added an "N" and changed his birth year from 1922 to 1920 but same next of kin details et al!!!
Hearing :: Melbourne International Comedy Festival on the telly in the background
Liking :: my life! A lot!!
Wanting :: to be sewing...

Very sad

Today is a very sad day.
The Sweetheart's Dad passed away at 11 this morning.
He went into Epworth Hospital yesterday morning after a few little T.I.A.s but this was not at all expected.

This is when I wrote about him on ANZAC Day last year, at the bottom of that entry about the other soldiers in my family.

And this is the quilt I made for him last year when he moved in to Happy Paddocks. He had it on his bed all the time, but hidden under the bedspread as he was so worried somebody might steal it. But he showed everyone so the whole world knew where it was anyway!

Here he is with The Sweetheart and my brother-in-law at his 88th birthday party in January. The BIL is such a pest - here he is pulling Dad's whiskers...

This is the entry for Dad's birthday with a little bit about him.

My Dad died when I was 17, he had been ill for ten years before he died (Multiple Myeloma) which meant I was really very young when he was last a healthy fathering man.
I have so missed having a Dad in my life for most of it. The Sweetheart's Dad was a bloke who certainly lived life to the full. (And then some!). Yep, he had a good innings...

I am going off to have a little think, and a cuppa tea, and then drive to Melbourne.

St Patrick's Day

I celebrated St Pat's Day by getting a gastro thing and feeling very very GREEN.
About as green as Ireland in this lovely photo of my DDIL. S2 took this last year at Bunratty Castle whilst they were having a mid-summer break from busy old Dublin.
There are more of her photos here at her gallery.

And so I have just been wallowing in between self-pity and the bathroom and my bed this week and have done very little else.
Feeling much better now, and have even retained something in my poor innards - dried bikkies and lots of fluids - but it is a start.

Nothing has been done on blogaversary quilt, neither quilting it, or picking a winner. So it is still open for entries!


I hope everyone else had a blast this week for St Patrick's Day - even if you aren't Irish!

More op shop treasure!!!

And I found some more op shop treasure at The Salvos in Albury!!!
This is four panels that had been hand sewn into curtains, so really easy to pull apart. Each piece of material is about 2 metres long, lovely 1960's print I guess.
In all 8 metres of material for $6...

Just look at these mad statues of liberty, space capsules, astronauts, and all with luscious lime green and hot pink accents!!!
Think this will just HAVE to be a 1960's frock for next summer:



And this is S2 with Trevor sucking up to him. He thinks Trevor is depressed, so he cuddles him and says "Are you sad, Dear Little Dog?" and the DLD gazes soulfully at S2 and snuggles in and sighs "Yes I am, but less so when you cuddle me. Don't stop"....


The quilt is a couch quilt for The Sweetheart's lounge room...

Quilts

I took some photos of quilts I have made for S2 over the years.

This was for his 18th birthday. It was half square triangles and a charm pack of plaids, lovely gold and Jinny Beyer borders:

And then his 21st which was hexagons made from 60* triangles, but with two strips of orange and turquoise sewn together. I used the hexagons with orange centres for the front of the quilt, and the turquoise centres for the reverse and the borders. From memory about 30 - or more - of each colour, the oranges range from almost pink through to gold at the other end of the spectrum. And the turquoises range from pale blues through to almost indigo.



This is the reverse. I had the shakes when I first slashed the large hexagon!

This was their first house warming quilt which I made before they went overseas:

I shall have to go digging through my archives to find a photo of their Wedding Quilt. This is a good start, however!

I can't believe how much quilting I did on them. Back in the olden days before I got ill and when I had far more energy...

Time flies

I have been away doing all sorts of things.
Last weekend was Labour Day long weekend. To celebrate the 8 hour day everyone in Victoria takes a holiday...

We went to Mitta Mitta to visit my brother and sister in law at their wonderful Witches Garden.
This past weekend was extremely rainy - a remnant of a couple of cyclones that have been wandering around the northern parts of Australia. So warm(ish) tropical rain bucketing down. We drove up in the rain to the Dartmouth Dam because it was too wet to do anything else:


And look at the rain pouring down the spillway cuttings (been years since there was water over the spillway from the dam, sadly) into the Mitta River:


Same as last year - the Might Mitta Muster was on. (Check out the link for last year's photos in the sunshine!).
Because of the rain all the woodchop events were cancelled, and many of the horse events too. There was a clever young bloke with a pile of whips he had made himself, and he was thrashing them around his ears, and around the ears of anyone who was brave (silly) enough to be his 'assistant'. What looks like smoke is the rainwater evaporating off the ends of his whips at the speed of sound as he cracks them:

And THEN I stayed on for a few days and helped my S2 and his darling move into their new home in Albury. This was some of the 1/3 truckload of boxes that had been in storage for the five years they have been working in Europe, and also some of the treasures they air-freighted home from Dublin. It was like Christmas for them, discovering all sorts of delights:

The bride is wearing her hen's night veil with the red devil horns...
All those boxes are now unpacked and their contents tucked away in their right places. It seems the only thing that got smashed along the way was the Man of Steel tin (sorry about the blurry pic - I was laughing too hard at this symbol of irony):


Tomorrow I shall post some pics of the quilts I have made for them and that I not only got to take photos of but GOT TO WASH (one was for his 18th birthday, the other for his 21st. Only one of them had been washed. EVER. He is now 33... And he lived under them all through 5 years at Uni. They were pretty stinky...)

Relax...!!!!

It is fine - I remembered who it was who sits at a big sloping desk with their ear to the intrawebs counting all the visitors to this site, and writing them on a chalk board for me.

It is Site Meter and they really are useful if you are looking for a counter.

AAAGHHHH!!!!

Gack and ack!!!

I have been playing around with my blog appearance (you may have noticed...) - got rid of all the crappy other people's images and just made it rather plain.

Next week I shall ask that immensely clever DIL of mine to show me how to write my own HTML stuff so I can be totally original.

ANYWAYS - did anyone happen to notice the really clever counter I had at the bottom of the page and think, "Ooh, that is useful - I will have one of those"? Cos if you did can you please send me the link? I accidentally deleted it this arvo whilst cleaning up on the page.

I did get really useful info from them, who/what/where/when and page views as opposed to blog views etc as well length of time. All sorts of stuff.
And now it is gorn, gorn, gorn.

And of course I am away from home now cos I have to help S2 and DIL move house etc so don't have any of those reports at my finger tips.

Sigh.
Please help me!!!!

Double sigh.

Blogaversary Give-away

And to celebrate my first blogaversary I am going to give away one of my quilts.

Freshly made for this momentous occasion.
To be perfectly Frances with you - is STILL being made for this milestone!!!!

Here is a hint of it. It will be about 45" x 55" when it is finished - give or take a few inches depending on what sort of borders I discover at the quilt shop I am heading off to right now...





Please post a link to this give-away notification on your blog, and leave a comment telling me you have done that.

And in a couple of weeks I shall get some impartial person to randomly draw a winner.
Please make sure your blog settings are such that I can email you. It is a good thing to do anyway, because then bloggers can write and thank you for leaving a comment on their blogs.
And you know the rules for this sort of thing - keep it nice please!
P.S. Please note the rules!!!!
The only one is below the photo of the quilt - "...post a link ...on your blog, and leave a comment telling me...".
I am going to be tough here - you should know that I am the eldest sister of six kids. I was always the one held responsible for all the naughtiness of my sibs - so I am a stickler for rules (especially when applied to others....!).

AND THE WINNER IS CINDY OF B.C. Check it all out at:

http://banaghaisge.blogspot.com/2010/04/and-winner-is.html

Thank you all for your lovely comments, and your enthusiasm, and your entries.
And if you aren't a quilter but would love a quilt I can always teach you how to make one. Or I will make one but that costs LOTS...
Again, thanks heapsly, you are all wonderful winners. 
I had to type "Communicate fullness" as  verification on a post to Facebook. I reckon that isn't such a shabby motto for life, actually.
Go and communicate fullness!!! 

Something useful

Look at this most very useful colour wheel tool:
http://colorschemedesigner.com/

I would like to grab the front page to show you here but I can't figure out how to do that (yet).
So, just go and have a look, and have a play around with it.

You can work out all sorts of triad, tetrad, mono colour schemes.
ALL sorts of things!!!!

And thank you to Ansie at http://sonenskadu.blogspot.com/ who had this tucked away on her blog.

Back to making that quilt top for the give-away...

Blogaversary begins...

And here is a little peek at what is on offer for my Blogaversary give-away.
I started it on Monday, and it is coming along very well indeed! It is a jelly roll - Mary Engelbreit for Moda. One of the JRs I got from Miss Vikki Frou Frou when she was having her clean-out recently(ish)
The top is almost together, I just need to get some more border material - I think red...


Stay tuned!!!!

Quality Time!

And not just Quality Time but Quantity Time, too, with most of my darling boys.

S2 and his wife have been living and working in Dublin for a few years, before that they were in Barcelona, and I haven't seen them for 3½ years.

Last Monday evening they came to Melbourne. The Sweetheart and I picked them up from the airport (two hours late...) and drove them to their hostel in St Kilda (sharing a room with 8 other backpackers - but CHEAP living!), to dinner and we had a great catch-up. So very good to see both of them, and nothing seems to have changed. They are both still funny and clever and happy, and such a peaceful couple.

Tuesday there was a big rally for live music, S.L.A.M. - Save Live Australian Music. The state government has changed the laws for venues with live music where the venue owner now has to provide security no matter what. One publican had two people in his bar - and one was playing guitar to the other one. He was fined $600.

That is our friend Gus Read-Hill holding the banner, on the RH side of the photo. He came all the way down from Castlemaine just for the rally. His late dad was a pretty special music man...

Three of my boys came to the rally. This is the most I have had in one spot for 8 years. Never had more than two at any one time - that is a long time for a Mummy not to be with her family I reckon.

This is my ¾ of my handsome boys and their lovely women.

We marched from the steps of the State Library at the top end of Swanston Street, down to Bourke Street and then up Bourke to Parliament Hous. Following the Rockwiz Orchestra on a flat bed truck playing "It's A Long Way To The Top".

This is a Youtube clip someone kindly put together:




And we marched - when we were assembled at the end S4 climbed on a tram shelter and got some good crowd shots, too.
There were people massed from Spring Street all the way back down to Swanston Street. Such a great feeling.
Oh - and only one police car behind us when we were leaving. Not much security....
On Wednesday we drove to Geelong and then back to the other side of Melbourne looking for a car to buy. The Subaru dealership in Geelong had an Impreza that was nothing like the one that was shown on their website, and the useless used car dealer (with the scary porn name of Rod Gohardly or similar) was most apathetic about selling anyway. Apart from also being a thousand dollars dearer than advertised the car didn't look like it had been driven for months, and the engine was all corroded and dirty.
S2 asked "What sort of a deal for cash?" and Mr Gohardly said "Dealers prefer financing - we get more money that way".
And this is for a $20,000 second hand car!
We walked. Actually, we almost ran!

We found a great Subaru Impreza at a Honda dealer in Doncaster. And they couldn't have been more helpful, additionally, the car had driven 10,000 kms less, was a year younger and three thousand dollars cheaper than the one in Geelong.
They were very happy with a bank cheque, and handed over the keys after giving the car a roadworthy, and us lots of lovely cups of tea, coffee, etc.
Boo sucks to you apathetic and pathetic used bomb dealer in Geelong.

Here are the happy new vehicle owners.

On Sunday they came up and stayed, yesterday they left to head off to Albury where they are planning to live.
They just need a house to rent. And quickly, too cos they have booked a removalist for next Tuesday to pick up all their treasures which have been in storage on the Central Coast (between Sydney and Newcastle) since before they went to Barcelona.


And you are probably wondering what has happened to the give-away to celebrate my blogaversary, too...
Stay tuned - there is a quilt zipping through my sewing machine.
Be patient.
Stay tuned.
No, stop shoving at the back. Be patient, I said!!!!!