Learning

This year I have been trying to do different things.  Not radical, but moving away from the familiar and the tried and true.  This has included making an effort to try different restaurants and learning new things.  For the latter, I've started cooking lessons at the Ministry of Food and I'll write a post on this at a later stage.  With my sewing, I thought I would try to do something other than quilting - as much fun as it is, I'd like to be able to make something that involves other techniques.  So, in addition to the Sewing Circle Tote (which is still a WIP), I decided to make a sewing gadget roll.  After admiring one made by a lovely lady from the Melbourne Modern Quilt Guild around two years ago, she lent me her pattern (Burda 7980) and this sat on my shelf until around April this year, when I decided that I wanted a project that would be relatively quick to complete.  So with some fabric given to me by another Guild member as the base, I dived in.  While a project like this wouldn't be a big deal for a competent sewer, it involved some techniques that were new to me, including sewing from a paper pattern, attaching velcro, using elastic and sewing on bias binding.  I also had a few frustrating moments of turning casings for elastic, painstakingly using a chopstick, before another lovely person from the Guild suggested a tool that I could use to make the task easier.  I think the answer actually is not to make narrow casings out of drill, but the tool was a help. Anyway, it was finished a few weeks ago and while a bit wonky in spots, I am really happy with it, particularly the measuring tape ties that I picked up from Spotlight.  And my rotary cutter won't be just rolling around the bottom of a bag when I got to Sit and Sew Events, which was the real reason that I wanted to make the roll in the first place.

The week that was

Oh dear, the blog has been neglected.  Facebook has a lot to answer for.  Despite being enthusiastic about keeping a blog about our fabulous holiday, the time required to keep things up to date and my inability to work out how to upload photos from the iPad meant that this just did not happen.  It was so much easier to update from Facebook with quick sound bites on what we were up to.

One meme that I did really like to keep up with was Sunday Snippets by Tinnie Girl.  However, due to life changes, she cut down blogging activity earlier this year and it looks like the blog has now been retired for the immediate future.  So I am going to try and keep this up by myself under the title 'The week that was".  So this was mine:

A beautiful evening earlier this week that gave hints of the wonderful late winter weather to come.

Pretty drinks with a special friend.

Perfection - the last day of winter was one of the best we've had this year and this gorgeous camellia summed it up for me.

The first day of spring was spent celebrating Fathers' Day and a special boy's second birthday.