Finding the way once more!

As May slowly comes to an end and June looms around the corner, I am remiss to say that I have finished ONE measly Quilt this year (and I admit freely that it was mainly done and dusted in 2009, I was just too darn lazy to sew the binding down ;) I have pieced together ONE measly top and back (Round Robin) and I have really struggled with piecing another top for my very Best Friends baby girl who is now 6 months old. I admit that the quilt in question has been a little out of my ability, but being me – I decided to run with it and just do.

Pretty much what I do with most things and sometimes they work, sometimes I’m not so lucky.

Well this one – I made a HUGE mistake on the centrepiece, as I slowly added borders on point, the HUGE mistake became an IMPOSSIBLE mistake and one that I kicked myself on over and over until it just became all too hard and I shoved it back in the cupboard. Today I decided enough was enough and unpicked the border that had the IMPOSSIBLE to fix mistake and after a quick outing with the girl to this:

 

Best tickets in town I tell ya – who doesn’t love Abby Tucker!

I returned determined to FIX my errors.

Thankfully the little Miss decided today she WOULD sleep and in the 2 hours – I cut, I cursed, I sewed, I cut some more and cursed some more and low and behold I have a quilt top that is WOW nearly finished!!! Now to decide whether I should add another border I just count my chickens and end it with this border, a wee bit smaller than anticipated – but it just looks so super sweet the way it is currently!

And no – I cannot show any more photos than this, my best mate reads this on occasion and I want it to be a surprise when she FINALLY gets it!!!

*******************************

With the creative juices flowing once more, I am inspired and ready to tackle whatever may come next!

Maybe it will be piecing together this sweet and VERY BASIC quilt ~ just because!

Maybe it will be doing more work on this bright little number.

The skies the limit and I am BACK in the creative groove baby!

Spoilt a little more!

Today the postie arrived with the last of my Birthday FQ’s ~ I say it in the plural because Anna totally spoilt me by sending MORE than one! Plus she threw in some gorgeous little hair pins and a bookmark type thingy (Sorry if I have wrong terminology… my brains a little fuzzy today ;)

I have to say I am TOTALLY impressed with my FQ’s received, I requested vintage type small print in orange and blues (or other) to use in my dear jane and I’m pleased to say – all of them are just perfect… let’s hope I’ve picked nearly as well for the rest of the girls birthdays!

**********************************

And of course having a crafty mum always helps in the birthday stakes… a gorgeous quilt panel to go on the ‘pending to do list’

 

PLUS a gorgeous American Jane pack of charm squares… I need something relatively easy – so am thinking of whipping these together in a simple pattern and sashing it in white just for ME!

Whose Party is it anyway?

It’s been a Big Week of Birthdays in Blogland this week! Cathy has been celebrating with her P Party… Selina is dreaming of a laundry party (?)… Emily is celebrating a whopping 1000 posts…

Well this humble little blog is jumping on the bandwagon of celebrations too (very sheepish of me) …

This is my 500th Post. I’d never have thought it when I started blogging nearly 3 years ago that I’d reach 500 (mainly) craft related posts so soon…

Happy Blog-a-versary
Carrose Creations!!! 

To top that off - it’s also my birthday today! Age? Well let’s just say if you take the years I’ve been blogging, times it by 10 and add the amount of years I’ve been bloggin… you should get pretty darn close ;)

Happy Birthday To Me!

My husband has totally come up with the goods this year, buying me Season 2 of True Blood as well as these little beauties:

 

My first ever Polaroid Camera (plus film) and a 365 book from Kikki-k!  He even threw in some super cute stickers too! 

I’m half considering embarking on a 365 art journalling epic challenge starting today… based loosely on the gorgeous journal seen here, be sure to check out her link, she does beautiful work!!!  

*********************************

My online Quilting Buddies have totally spoilt me with our single Fat Quarter Swap.. except some have naughtily sent me way more than a single fat quarter ~ I feel positively Spoilt – thanks heaps girls!!! You’ve all done so well at picking out the fabrics too, just exactly what I wanted for my Dear Jane Quilt!!!

 

From Left, Kirsty, Dani, Nic, Kayscha & (front) Esther. (& one more to come ~ I love extended birthday mail ;)

Today I’ve had plans of doing a bit more on the blanket, while gushing over the gorgeous patterns in this new magazine I picked up – it is super cute!!! Wonder if a trip to Spotlight would be out of the Question this afternoon???

I then intended on doing some more pages of my art Journal:

 

Except a certain little girl thinks she is too big to sleep and is now resting on the lounge with Tinkerbelle… I’m not sure the paints will see the light of day!  Oh well there’s always tomorrow!!!

A big Task!

LAST winter, I had an outing with my 2 besties to our local wool shop, where I splurged and bought myself… 

Excited about my first ever purchase of expensive wool + new needles and my first attempt at lace knitting… I cast on that night and knitted furiously for a week or two.

I managed to knit up a ball and a decent length of scarf. It then sat. Gathered some dust. Got buried under other more exciting projects. Carried around the house in my daughters ‘bower bird basket’. Until I realised a few days ago that it’s my birthday next week and I cast this on nearly a YEAR ago! How embarrassing!

Joking to my Quilting Buddies I said I was going to finish it this weekend :o

Well that 2nd (& LAST) ball of wool isn’t getting any smaller any quicker.

Back to the grindstone needles!

A Beautiful Day

A small snapshot of our day!

A girls coffee date, enjoyed sitting in the sunshine on the back tiles, with our feet in the grass!

My Little babe – growing up far too fast!

The itty bitty cycad we planted soon after we moved in, is ginormous ‘day of the triffids’ huge!

This old man spent the morning chasing flies & baking in the sun! Some days I don’t think he will ever slow down! Then I find him fast asleep on my good quilt on MY lounge chair!

Some bubble art, found via here

And the resulting paper – this was so cool! If you leaned the cup toward the paper while blowing bubbles, you got a fine splattering of colour all over!

Important Note to parents – when getting a 3 year old to blow bubbles in the bubble mix… make sure they don’t get confused and suck instead of blow!!! Mine did & she is now sporting a green tongue and green lips :o

Cleaning up is just as much fun! One papertowel ready to be made into a card or something & the paper patties – well they sort of just fell into the mess as we were making it!

Vintage Ephemera

My Art Journal Course called for a vintage Atlas to use on certain pages. It was not a imperative that we have one. But me (being me) decided I simply had to have one. So as you know from my post earlier this week… I finally found a vintage Atlas to use. It cost me next to NOTHING (I got the atlas + 4 kids books for Miss K – for $ 1.50)

I made the mistake of Showing Big J (my darling husband)

BIG Mistake.

BIG

(name the movie ;)

He said – no way in heck am I cutting this up for the sake of art

:(

He has however promised to go find me an old Jacaranda Atlas in his office that I can cut up to my hearts content :)

Bloggy Good Friends

I’ve met some ‘bloggy’ good friends over the internet. I’d have never thought that my love of Quilting and Blogging would open up this whole new world of like minded gals, but boy am I glad it has!

When Esther and I recently signed up for the Art Journal Course, one of our fellow Quilting (& soap making, knitting, toilet training, baking, animal husbandry, crochet, tantrum support group) buddies heard about it and offered to send us both a bag of scrap-booking scraps in the hopes it would come in handy for our course! 

Well my whopping BIG parcel arrived from Nic yesterday (be sure to check out Nic’s blog – it is gorgeous and a lovely read!) and my gosh – boy do I feel super spoilt. After explaining to my husband that it was NOT a parcel that I have purchased (there’s been a few too many of late) I upended it on the dining room table and by golly ~ WOW! There is so much super cute stuff and I’ve earmarked a heap for my art journal!

So thank you SO MUCH! Nic – It is ‘bloggy’ awesome!!!

I am feeling totally spoilt!

50 Books in 2010!

A quick update on my reading list of 2010 (listed on the side bar)

I honestly don’t reckon 50 is going to be achievable this year, but I have managed to catch up a bit over the Easter break + subsequent long weekends!

Add to the fact the first Nine Sookie Stackhouse novels (how hot is Eric – oh baby!!!) have more than bulked up my numbers as these books are smaller and easy to read (especially handy when I have far too much going through my head with work!)

Next on the list is the fourth book of the Elm Creek Quilts novels, I had to take the book back off my mum who is also hanging to read these! Looking forward to getting back into the Quilty reading once more!

Does Anyone know of any other craft related ‘easy-read’ novels. I did the Friday night knit club last year, the Elm Creek Quilts are in hand raring to go – but is there another series out there waiting my attention? 

A week and nothing to see here…

Seriously. Crafting is seriously MIA apart from a couple more journal pages which I completed on Mothers Day but have only just upload today!

My Happy Place

Nostalgic Childhood Thoughts (Bonus prompt)  

Music I Love Most

A closer Look

That’s me by the way ;) 10 years on, a few more wrinkles LOL!!! 

The sewing machine is sitting gathering dust in the hopes that one day I might get back to it ;)

But I’m happy. I pulled out the crochet squares for Miss K over the weekend and finally finished the one I started last month as well as hooking on (?) another square. Once this one is done I will have a total of 10 :o it’s slower going than I expected… oh well if it doesn’t get completed this year, there’s always next year ;)

I’ve also pulled out the vest (yes the vest that is taking FOREVER to complete. I’ve managed another 3 sets of cable pattern or approx 5cm… only 15cm to go… counting down!!!

This morning Miss K and I dropped by our local Op Shop because I’ve been hoping to get an old atlas that I can cut up for this course. Four Bucks later… I walked out with a (really) vintage atlas, a pop-eye pillowcase, 3 letter writing kits, 4 books for Miss K and some paper type stuff that will be used in my art journal!

I think I’m addicted!!!

More pages in my journal – page 9 & 10!!!

My current dream List

Now & Forever 

It sure beats my attempts at scrapbooking and what I love most about these is it doesn’t matter if my hand writing is a bit messy… it’s totally ME! I’m also loving getting around & checking out a heap of new (and pretty) blogs of some of my fellow art-journallers!   

In keeping with

the art-journalling theme of yesterdays post…

If you had Three Wishes – what would they be?

The next prompt called for a new workspace! We decided last minute this morning to jump in the car & head to the sunny coast hinterland for a walk to the Kondalilla Falls, followed by lunch & a play on the swings at Mary Cairncross Park… I grabbed my art journal and some supplies, 10 mins up the road

we Stopped for fuel.

We got no further – the silly darn car wouldn’t start!!! Here we are stuck at a busy little fuel station that had no jumper leads. We had to ring RACQ and wait half hour for them to come out and replace the battery… meanwhile I started thinking new cars… (I get a thing about  cars once they start breaking down… it’s almost a personal afront, like the car let me down – which I think is a fear that resonates back to my first ever car Holly – she broke down A LOT!) ok so you would think  I would have taken the opportunity to pull out the journal – but by the time Miss K ate her way through all the food I’d taken, suffered the worst ant bite EVER (OMG you should have heard the whinging), buying a tube of savlon for said ant-bite AND an ice-cream which incidentally is now smeared all over her white shirt *rolleyes* there wasn’t much time left to journal!

By the time RACQ arrived and sold us a new battery for $160 :o we decided it was too late to head up the coast and instead went for a quick play in the park and came home for lunch. I did however manage to sit down with my coffee at the back table and do the next page.

Deep down, it seems I have a lot of inner thoughts…

 

It felt like sacrilege cutting up that doily for the bottom corner, but gosh it’s so darn pretty on there! I am having a real thing for orange followed by green and purple lately – not sure why? This one was a good exercise because I had to use what I had in my pencil case & took away the indecision of the page.

I must say I am really enjoying this class!!!  

A spot of Journalling…

My online Art Journalling Course started earlier in the week, except as luck would have it – I had no time to really sink my teeth into it. I’ve been brainstorming all week and well… let’s just say when you are on a roll – keep on rolling!

Prompt 1 ~ A new Season

Now keep in mind - I can’t draw… but hey do you like my birdie??? IT’S FREEHAND!

Prompt 1 ‘cont’d - Immediate goals and dreams this season

Prompt 2: Today Felt

This one was so cool and oh so messy! Tissue paper mod podged (or for us Aussies – glued with PVA… thanks Dr Google!)

Prompt 3: I want more than anything…

I found this gorgeous vintage fabric that Esther sent me for my birthday last year ~ just perfect for what I wanted to achieve! I think I need to invest in a better paintbrush – my words kept skewing as I painted them!!! Any recommendations?

Although they will probably never be classed as works of ‘art’ they are so ME and I actually like them… which is saying a lot as I generally never like any of my arty endeavours! Regardless – I am so far really enjoying this class and am getting a lot out of it, even if just clearing my head from a busy week. I’m hopeful it will open up all new avenues in my crafty life!  It’s definitely opening up a whole other area of craft blogs… my bulging reader – bursting at the seams LOL!