Happy Birthday to...

my dear, sweet, kind, generous, thoughtful and all round wonderful friend Liesl.

Image credit

 I'm sorry I didn't have time to make you a cake m'dear, but I did find you this amazing sewing machine cake (yes, that's really a cake!) to drool over!

You can wish Liesl a Happy Birthday too: liesl [at] hoppobumpo [dot] com In case you were wondering, Liesl is of course turning 21.

Hope you have a perfect day HB.

My Creative Space

1 awesome quilty friend

1 oversized quilt top*

3 layers of quilt sandwich

361 basting pins

1 walking foot

1 rather large blueberry danish & a packet of Twisties

Making progress on my very first quilt? Priceless.

*I added a border. A rather large border. This quilt started out as a baby quilt. It almost fits my queen size bed. Ambitious? Deluded? You decide.

Do you know what this is?

In case you can't tell (due to the very poor picture quality) it's a walking foot. Installed in anticipation of a rather exciting crafternoon tomorrow. And despite the fact that Janome provides virtually no instructions regarding how to attach this foot to one's machine, I managed to attach it in less than 2 minutes, thanks to this excellent post which can be found at Hoppo Bumpo.

Incidentally, Liesl's post contains much better pictures of the walking foot, probably using a fancy camera with a flash instead of an iphone ...and yes, it's actually the same one, thanks for the loan Liesl!

Crafternoon

Had a lovely day on Friday not doing Craft with Liesl. We had planned to do some crafting. I had carefully (and rather ambitiously, as it turns out) packed my Janome and a fairly large container of WIPs into my car, along with a fruit platter and my 3 children who were looking forward to a playdate with Argy & Bargy...wait....aaaaah, now I see the problem. We were outnumbered.

Between us we have 5 delightful young 'uns, who all had a fabulous day eating and drinking and playing ball, chasey, piano, cars, trains, farms and hide and seek. However, I do believe in all our planning we failed to notice one vital factor: It turns out that 5 small children on a playdate and a Crafternoon cannot coexist without disrupting the Space-Time Continuum. Who knew?

However, we managed to admire each other's WIPs talked about my woeful attempts to learn to crochet, and we chatted about all the crafting we would like to be doing,

 partake of some delicious Hoppo Bumpo biscuits and a latte,

and we were even invited back despite this disaster created by Poor Point 3 at lunch!

I may have the answer...

I was reading this post over at the lovely (but not at all sucky) Hoppo Bumpo and realised I may have some valuable information to share with you fellow crafters. If you are after something that really sucks, the answer is ducted vacuuming. It is completely awesome, and sucks better and harder than any other vac I've ever owned. Thread, hair, mushy chewed up vegemite toast, bowling balls, lego pieces, small children...you get the picture? And before you think it's a fanciful and extravagant idea but you couldn't possibly - mine cost less than $1000 and was easily installed in my 90 year old house in half a day, by The Bloke Who Lives At My Place (who usually masquerades as a public servant during daylight hours).

Seriously, best thing I ever did. Now if I could just tear myself away from my WIPs long enough to actually do some housework...