Mini Beasts

On Thursday my co teacher and I went on a school excursion to the Botanical Gardens and Melbourne Museum on a search for mini beasts. The Gardens were beautiful and we looked at insect repelling plants and plants that attract insects. We found the herb garden which was the centre for medicine making 150 years ago in Melbourne. It supplied many of the herbs for doctors in the early days.

We smelled the different plants and made little pot pourri bags to take home just as the rain started tumbling down in earnest. But not to be deterred these intrepid 8 year olds marched onto the Children's Garden where we learned about and played with worms.

And fished for  bugs in the pond.

 It was really cold.  Of course few were well dressed for the occasion.  After all, it is nearly summer.

I really got a buzz out of finding this active bee hive in one of the trees.

The museum was equally inspiring and some of the mini beasts were alive. Ants in colonies, giant stick insects, spiders, locusts.....

I loved the beetles the most. The colours and varieties are just incredible.

We came back to school tired but totally mad about bugs!

The value of graph paper

I said yesterday that I was going to cut into my Flea Market Fancy fabric last night. Instead, I ended up going to my LQS holiday open house. Then I came home and started plotting the best way to use FMF fabric. My big question is: how has this fabric come to have such an iconic status? Sure, the colors are great. Sure, the designs are wonderful. But great and wonderful fabric hits the shelves on a weekly basis. So it's just puzzling to me. But I would love to know why personally I am willing to spend way over market value for a fat quarter!  And why can I give away literally yards of fabric that I know I won't use, and then freak out feel a bit apprehensive when I see this little scrap on the floor that could inadvertently be thrown away? Is therapy in order? (And please don't suggest fabric therapy as I think we all know what that means...)

When I was clearing out my sewing room, I went through stacks of old quilting books. I quickly thumbed through them, and then most of them went into the donation pile. There were a couple of patterns that looked interesting enough to make a copy for future reference. One of them was this one, based on an old vintage quilt. The designer called it "Mama's pop beads." Anyone old enough to remember pop beads?

While the fabrics in this quilt did nothing to draw me in, I really was intrigued by the design. With a few change-ups. In the original quilt, all the "beads" were small-scale blue prints in the same value, and the connectors were different colors. My original thought was to also strip piece the beads. Each bead would be the same color family of FMF, but it would have a good variety of fabric in the bead, probably including some that were not part of the FMF fancy line.

But then I got out my graph paper and colored pencils so I could check color placement. And that's when I had a much better idea of making each bead out of one single FMF fabric, and all the connectors will be a brown fabric from the FMF line, all against a background of Kona snow. Much less sewing, it will show off the fabric, and it will have the clean and modern look that I'm going for.

So what do you all think? Is it time to make the first cut?

Tea Time II RR

  This is Thearica's Tea Time CQI Round Robin block that I have been working on for the past few days in sunny Florida, just resting up for a couple of weeks before the holiday rush.  The block arrived with Carolyn's gorgeous work already completed under the tea pot - an embroidered tablecloth with the two sweetest napkins.  Cathy made the steam drifting out of the tea cup, the hanging tea-bag and a candy sitting in the crinkly wrapper.  She also added the crocheted party hat with all the trimmings.  Cathy also added a pretty rambling SR rose vine.  Above is the block with Carolyn's Cathy's and my work.

I embellished the top right tea cup with beaded bunches of grapes, gold vine embroidery and silk ribbon leaves.

I also chose to do the teapot with various stitches, and beads.

I echoed Carolyn's wavy rose vine with a scalloped chain stitch in silk ribbon with clusters of  flowers and leaf beads at each point

Since writing this post, I've embroidered another of the teacup and saucers.