A dump of random (mostly crafty) photos (fixed now!)

After such a long time without blogging, I seem to have forgotten how to just sit down and start writing. So to ease myself back in gently, a photo-heavy post (which of course takes much more work than just typing stuff, so I’m not sure why I think this is easier…)

Anyway, this is going to mostly be going through my photos folder and posting whichever ones catch my eye.

First up, my birthday cake (or one of my birthday cakes – I ended up having two, one I ordered (and didn’t think to take a photo of, but it was chocolate and really impressive, and I was under instructions from my dietician to eat lots of it 🙂 ) and this one I made). I was following an online tutorial, and it was supposed to come out as a perfect rainbow. Obviously, that didn’t quite work, but the random weird swirls of colour it ended up with still looked pretty cool, I reckon. And tasted good, which was more important!

I’ve finished a couple of big quilts since I last posted photos. Well, one big one, and one lap-sized. The smaller was for a work friend who’d had a series of pretty major health problems, and then in the middle of all that, lost her mother. So Pieta, who I’d sewn the Healing Hearts for Christchurch blocks with earlier in the year, suggested we do another cooperative sewing project and make her a quilt. We came up with a general concept (lots of purple, because our friend is a big fan of Prince, and loves all things purple), but then our respective overly-busy schedules meant we couldn’t find any times to get together and sew, so I ended up just making the quilt myself and then handing it over to Pieta for hand-binding, but I still consider it a team effort.

I didn’t manage to get a decent photo of it, unfortunately. This was taken with it draped over a sofa at work after Pieta brought it in to show me the finished binding before she wrapped it up to give to our friend.

It’s a variation on a jelly-roll race quilt, but instead of being made from a jelly-roll, I just cut strips from various fabrics in my stash. Which meant I got a lot more variation in the length of the strips, which I think made for a more interesting quilt (and meant I could change the size a bit, to make it more square than a traditional jelly-roll race. The pops of yellow among the purple reminded me of the lights of houses scattered across the hill in Lyttelton, where our friend lives, so I called the quilt “Purple Town”.

Because it was a pretty simple design, I went a bit overboard with the quilting, with lots of feathers and Angela Walters-style improv quilting. I was pretty proud of how it turned out, and our friend loved it – she’s hung it in the entrance-way of her home, so it’s the first thing she sees when she walks in the door, which I think is the best compliment she could ever give it!

The other big quilt I finished was for Fuzzle, as a thank-you present for her coming down to look after me after my surgery (because I had almost no movement in my arms for the first couple of weeks, because if I tried to move them I’d stretch the incisions across my chest). The original plan had been for Mum to come and be my post-surgery nurse, but a health crisis meant she couldn’t make it to Christchurch (and was facing her own surgery and at around the same time as mine!!) so all my friends rallied round to replace her. My local friends took it in shifts to stay with me for the first few days (as well as bringing regular deliveries of meals and entertainment), and then Fuzzle came and stayed for the rest of my recovery time, which was amazing.

So one of my big items of pre-surgery prep was making her a quilt. I’d been playing around in my design book with ideas using curved log cabin piecing, and she lives by the sea, so this sea-shell shape emerged as a design. The colour choices were obvious – Fuzzle’s favourite colour has always been green, with purple a close second 🙂

I’m not 100% happy with how it turned out – I like the scrappy look of the log cabins, but if I was to make it again, I think I’d try and keep the tones within each colour more consistent, so that the seashell shapes stood out a bit more. I feel like my quilting (basically long arcs echoing the seashells) helped define the shapes though, so I was reasonably pleased with the final effect. And Fuzzle loved it, which is the important thing.

I did a lot of other little craft projects in preparation for my surgery, too. I’d been obsessively following all the top surgery videos I could find on YouTube, and noting down all the things people had found helpful to have post-surgery, so I could be prepared.

OK, and also because it was a good excuse to play with fabric 🙂

First up was a bag for carrying my drains. Basically an apron with big pockets, that attached round my waist with velcro. I didn’t end up using this as much as I’d thought, because I’d based the measurements on what I’d found online, and it turned out that the drains my surgeon uses are much bigger and bulkier than the standard ones used in the USA (which, of course, was where most of the information I was finding was from). They fit in the pockets ok, but because I had the pockets on the front, whenever I sat down (which was most of the time, see: recovering from surgery) the tops of them would dig into my stomach. So I ended up just carrying the drains around in my hands a lot of the time, and only using the bag if I needed to go out (like when I had to go back to the surgeon’s office for a checkup). I think something more like a holster, with two big pockets on the sides, would have been a better design than an apron.

Next essential was a seatbelt pillow. This I did find really useful, because any time I had to get in a car, having a pillow between my chest and the seatbelt made things a lot less painful!

I made one for mum, too, but this one sized for the lap part of the seatbelt, because her surgery was in her abdomen:

And while I was stuffing long tubes, mum asked me to make her a draft excluder for her door:

Yes, it’s the same fabric as my seatbelt pillow. It was actually the fabric I’d used for the backing for Fuzzle’s quilt, so I had some long strips left over that I’d trimmed from the sides. I wasn’t just being mean using up scraps for the draft excluder though – it just happened to be a perfect match for the colour of her lounge suite, much better than anything else I had in my stash!

I also made myself a pillow with pockets, to hold useful things like the TV remote control. Not completely essential, but I had a whole load of scraps of nice linen fabrics I wanted to use. And it did turn out to be really useful – not so much for holding things, but for the first few nights, when I was sleeping on a recliner chair instead of in my bed, I slept with it against my chest as a barrier to discourage Parsnips from jumping up on me (although she was actually really good – she seemed to sense that I wasn’t up to having a cat on my lap, so instead of jumping up on me like she normally would, she spent most of the time sitting on the arm of the chair, as close to me as she could get but not actually on me).

I had two different ideas for the pocket, and couldn’t decide which to use, so I ended up making it double-sided, with pockets on each side. This side has one big pocket, and then the other side has two smaller pockets.

I purposefully made the pockets lie very flat to the pillow, so if there’s nothing in them, unless you look very closely it just looks like a normal cushion:

I loved how it turned out, so it’s still living on the chair in my living room, even though I don’t actually keep anything in the pockets.

(This is getting much longer than I planned, and there’s still a load more photos to go, so I think I’ll stop here for now, and continue with Part 2 another day.)