Little Fish Creations

I’ve just finished constructing two linen tea towels.  Hemmed by hand with neat mitred corners and a simply appliqued stripe of linen ribbon across one end.  These are for me 🙂

This cloth (towelcloth in off-white), was a spur of the moment add-on to my order from Linnet.  It’s a ‘thick and thirsty’ fabric, good for drying a sink full of dishes and wiping down the benches afterwards.

I’m very pleased with the appliqued ribbon; such a relief to abandon the blackwork embroidery idea I was labouring under for a day or so.   I got a whole lot of enjoyment from working with the fabric and seeing the final product come together with the stitched detail using the full six strands of DMC linen embroidery thread in Ecru.

The fabric I bought for the swap tea towels, Linnet Natural Flax Biz, is much finer which would be good for printing onto if that’s what I decide to do.  But as a tea towel? I think this fabric will make a good towel for polishing glassware and wiping hands. Probably a good towel for people who are firm believers in the dishwasher.  People like me 🙂

I don’t know about the rest of you, but for most of my life the only linen fabric I had encountered was the tourist souvenier tea towel, printed with something like ‘Greetings from New Zealand’ and hung over a rail in my Nan’s kitchen.  These towels were stiff and seemed to smear the water around rather than soaking it up; such a different beast from my recent linen experiences.

Since I live within Australia’s most famous National Park I’m toying with the idea of printing up my own ‘tourist tea towel’ with a Kakadu iconic animal (crocodile?) or plant (pandanus?) and ‘Greetings from Kakadu’ splayed across the bottom.

But really.  Would it give me (and the recipient) as much satisfaction as a hand hemmed towel with some sublimely simple stitching detail? Or (and I am worried about this), would the participants be dissapointed that my contribution was a tea towel with a few poxy lines of stitching?

Last Friday a friend came around to my place so I could show her how to sew a dress for her daughter.  Of course, I’m ill qualified to be teaching anyone to sew garments since my skills are pretty rudimentary… So I thought I’d better make a trial dress before she arrived (above)

I drafted the pattern based on one of the dresses in that Japanese pattern book I recently bought.  The pattern had a gathered skirt which I replaced with an ‘all in one’ A-line shape. 

I think it worked out pretty well 🙂  I tweaked the hemline a bit for the final version which my friend sewed (and FINISHED!) during our 5 hour long marathon sewing play date. 

She used a red print cotton out of my stash to make up the dress and I think she did a marvelous job considering she’d never sewn before, my general lack of experience, and that we had her 5 month old daughter and 6 month old Jasper demanding our attention.

It wasn’t until that night that I realised that these patterns (which you trace off a big sheet at the back of the book) need to have seam allowances added.  No wonder everything works out so small!  What made me finally twig?  The shoulder straps on our dresses are very skinny compared to the pictures of the dress in the book.  The dresses still look pretty cute I reckon!

In other news: I’ve been sewing blocks together for the red and ‘neutral’ quilt.  Yesterday I had the moment of truth where I put the two block types together and realised that it isn’t going to work. 

Luckily, today my workroom is being converted into a spare bedroom as Chris’ mum arrives for a short visit tommorow.  I’m going to put the quilt away and think about it for a little while.  Meanwhile, I’ll be distracting myself with some hand embroidery. Yay!

Yesterday I braved the $AU/Yen exchange rate and made a huge order with Linnet.  I had a good excuse… I’ve signed up for a Linen Tea Towel swap.  Linen saps up water brilliantly, launders beautifully and will only get better with use*

I just realised that I didn’t blog about this linen tea towel that I embroidered last year.  It took me about 2 weeks to finish including hemming by hand. We use it as a hand towel in the kitchen.

I’m not going for anything so time consuming with my swap tea towels. But at the moment I’m tossing up between an embroidered design or turning my hand at stencilling.

So, I’m super excited about this swap because I’ll end up with 5 uniquely crafted tea towels from wonderful crafty people in internet land and I’ll have fun (and hopefully not too much angst) putting together 5 tea towels to send out in the world.

* I’m reading a book called Prehistoric Textiles by Elizabeth Barber.  According to the bit I read last night, linen was known to become more soft and pleasant with use and there’s even a great quote relating to linen from Pliny; ‘ever the better for rough handling’ or ‘semper iniuria melius’ if you are into latin.

Taking up most of my table today is the makings of Jasper’s christmas stocking. The embroidery isn’t quite the right dimensions, but I should be able to make it work, I’ve just got to start on it.

In the bottom left hand corner of the photo you can see the plastic pocket display book I’m using to organise my traced out patterns.  A big improvement on my previous ‘system’. 

And on the top left hand corner of the photo is the quilt that I’ve been working on.  This afternoon (baby willing) I’ll do some cutting.

Oh look! I made a cute pair of shoes.  You can get the pattern from Shara Lambert’s etsy shop if you’d like to make a pair too.

Even though I made the 9-12 month old size, they turned out too small for Jasper who turned 6 months old last week (JEEPERS!).  He’s got big feet :-). 

In other news:  I think I have an allergy to Mangoes.  Two years in a row of unbearable itchy rashes and this year it was on my lips and eyes as well.  Woe is me!!! I love mangoes.

In more other news: I am sad to say that Jasper is REALLY hungry.  He’s waking for feeds 3 times a night now.  AND the worst thing is that when he was weighed at the clinic last week it turns out that he had not put on any weight for 5 weeks. 

So over the weekend we got serious about solids, 3 times a day, and none of that ‘baby led solids’ palaver.  Nup, we’re shovelling it in and he doesn’t seem to mind.

Broccolli was a hit.  Not mashed up with rice cereal mind you, no that was spat out with great haste.  But Jasper took to the whole steamed floret with great enthusiasm.

He sucked it until only mushy stalk was left.

And I have to report that I had a good weekend – Chris took care of Jasper and I got some sewing completed.  YAY!

These pants FIT!  Woo Hoo.  I just added an inch to the width of each leg piece.

And Chris’ Christmas Stocking is done.  I hand printed the blue fabric years ago using a found piece of plastic.

AND I’ve also completed the linen hooded jacket for Jasper… but I’ll save that one for a dedicated blog post.  Here’s a sneek peek.

About 7 or 8 years ago I was given a ziploc bag with a few scraps of fabric and directions for making a paper pieced patchwork pincushion.  I had been dabbling in pottery for a few years before that, but after this little pincushion I ditched the clay for fabric and that was that.

I lived and breathed quilts and would stop at any quilt shop where ever I travelled and I collected reddish fatquarters with the idea of making a beautiful bed quilt. 

But I soon discovered that I could dye my own fabrics and I didn’t bother going to quilt shops anymore and never bought the light brown/neutral fabrics I wanted to use with the reds.

However, lately I’ve been browsing around some online fabric shops.  When I happened across a bunch of fat quarters in ‘neutral’ at the Fat Quarter Shop, I immediately thought of the quilt I’d planned so many years ago.

So now I’ve got all the fabrics here ready to go and I’m keen to spend the best part of November immersed in this quilt.  BUT before I get zooming with the rotary cutter I’ve got a few projects I want to finish:

– The second pair of pants for Jasper – modified to FIT this time.

– Sew up Chris’ Christmas stocking and work on the yellow and linen embroidery which I’ll use of Jasper’s stocking.

-Make Jasper a linen jacket… I’ve even made a muslin.  I must be learning from my mistakes 🙂

I haven’t been quick enough with the camera to get Jasper’s expression the moment the food enters his mouth.  It’s like the above pic, but he wrinkles up his nose more and looks at me like I’m trying to poison him. 

This week has been ‘not so good’.  Jasper is having trouble with his sleeping and I’m having trouble dealing with it.  I feel like I need a break, a full day would be ideal, but I’m breastfeeding, so the most I can hope for is 2.5hrs of break on the weekend. 

This is me today, my reflection in front of one of Susan Purdy’s photograms.

Random thoughts about motherhood:

– it’s fabulous to see Jasper develop and grow everyday.

– looking after Jasper has turned out to be a lot nicer experience than I anticipated.  I had thought it would be all work and no fun.

– I’m a task oriented person, I like working on something until it is finished.  I now get inturrupted alot and I get really frustrated about it.

– I like doing laundry.

– I can’t work out how other mums manage to cook dinner – I think that if I tried to produce a meal every night it would tip me over into crazyland. Chris has always cooked and I can’t see that changing any time soon.

– I need to find a way to excercise.  It’s 40deg outside EVERYDAY and taking a walk is no longer an option.  I’m thinking about aerobics video tapes.

– Have I thrown away my career?  I had a dream last night that many of my old VicRoads workmates were here on holiday and it was so nice to see everyone again. And for some reason I’m crying as I type this.

– I don’t read to Jasper enough

– We’ve been giving Jasper food to taste over the last week like grapes, banana, watermelon and mango and he just screws up his face and looks at us like we’re crazy people.  I tried to feed him some rice cereal yesterday and got the same response.

– I was going to wait to feed him solids until he’s 6mth old but he’s started waking for feeds during the night again and I think perhaps it’s because he’s ready for solids.  Last night he woke at 11:30pm, 3am and 6am and I’m grumpy about it.

– I’ve got overdue library books to return.

– Ok, that’s enough randomness for today. 

I’m on a mission this week to make christmas stockings for all three of us.  Mine uses a piece of embroidery that I had done with no purpose in mind, Yay!!!

I felt an earthquake last night!  The bed rocked backwards and forwards and our wardrobe doors rattled in sync. It was 7 on the richter scale, but it originated a long way away, so I suppose we got the soft tail of it. 

Chris was up trying to settle Jasper and didn’t notice anything.  I’ve heard that dogs get premonitions of these things… maybe babies do too? Maybe that’s why Jasper woke up and squawked the place down just before I felt the quake.

Years ago, when we lived in Gippsland, we experienced an earth tremor that we didn’tfeel.  However, a bag of books fell off a shelf which we thought was a bit odd at the time. Then we worked it out the next morning when we saw the news.

I had all sorts of ideas for things I could make today. But I’m having difficultly settling on anything.  I cut some shapes out of a magazine with the idea of doing a collage.  But it didn’t work out.  So I took some photos of the piles of cutout bits then chucked the lot in the bin.

We might go to the pool later.