Birthday Presents - Continue

Handed these presents out over the weekend.

I made this Quilting Organizer for a dear friend, Hettie Pringle.  She is my quilting teacher and mentor and you can read all about her here. 

It is the same pattern that I used for my sister, Christa's, Closet Organizer - I only used the designs for the larger embroidery frame resulting in 3 larger pockets than the 4 pockets you see below.  I also substituted the designs with a quilt related theme.

Design available from A Stitch A Half

My quilting friend, Sonja, received these 4 covered coat hangers.

Designs available from Artistic Designs

And so my two week holiday has sadly come to an end and it's back to work tomorrow.  I really enjoyed the time at home, but all good things must come to an end - eventually.

Birthday Presents

Spend the first week of my holiday mainly making birthday presents for various friends.  I get such a wonderful feeling of accomplishment with every project finished as I get to start a new project!

On Tuesday night at the Rotary Cutter's monthly meeting, I handed out these scissor cases together with a chocolate and an inspirational verse.

The design is available from a Stitch a Half

Charity Quilt - Part 1

Our quilt group, the Rotary Cutters, decided to donate a Sampler quilt for charity this year.  Every member got to choose her favourite technique and prepare 4 12.5 inch blocks.  We are donating the quilt to The Muscular Dystrophy Research Foundation of South Africa and hope that they will be able to raise money for research.  My firstborn died as a result of  Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy in 2003 3 weeks before his 20th birthday.

My 4 blocks looks like this and will form the centre of the quilt.

Late Louwrens Geel (17-09-1983 to 22-08-2003) with his baby brother Trevor jr in 2000.

Forest Quilt Wall hanging - Phase 1

Yesterday I attended a course by an awe inspiring teacher, Mari Strydom from Bultfontein who is also the owner of the local quilt shop, Lappiesland.  Her quilting journey started after being diagnosed with a debilitating disease and in spite of being in pain every day of her life, she just excelled.  A big thank you to Mari for sharing her knowledge with us.  I found this article about Mari on the Internet and you can also read about her on our Guild's blog here.

The Forest Quilt is constructed from little fabric pieces cut to about the size of matches as shown on the photo below.  The tree trunks were cut out of the brown fabric.

My inspiration, was this picture:

                                                         And my quilt looks like this:

It is however, far from finished as all the stitching have yet to be done.  The finished product will differ quite from this one, I hope...



Finally finished working overtime!

After working overtime the last 2 weeks as well as coming down with the flu last week and a severe migraine over the weekend, I'm finally back doing what I love most  - embroidering and quilting.  Yeah!

I uploaded all the Bushmen Rock Art Designs (a total of 44 designs in different sizes).  The animal set contains 26 designs and looks like this:

You can buy them as a set for $25 or as singles at $3 each and build your own set mixing and matching with the people set.

The people set contains 19 designs with the same pricing structure.



Bushmen Rock Art Designs

Have been working overtime the last week, so no embroidery or quilting done.  Will however be posting these designs at Craftsy in a week's time.

Panda Bear Cushion

I made a beautiful embroidered cushion featuring a panda bear scene depicted inside the paw print of a panda bear a few years back as a gift for my mother.  She recently asked me to embroider another one for her and as the weather forecast for today was extremely cold weather, I decided to rather stay home than quilt with the girls.

The design is from Embroidery Library and although it uses only 15 colours, there is a staggering total of 70 thread changes.  Luckily my Brother Innovis 4000 embroidery machine, threads automatically, so I can literally just sits back and watch it do the job for me.  The design is 118 x 203mm and 59 241 stitches.  Although the Innovis calculated the stitching time at 127 minutes at it's top speed of 1 000 stitches per minute, it took me 4 and a half hours to complete.

After 1 hour of stitching and 24 thread changes later, the design looked like this:

2 hours and 39 thread changes later:

3 hours and 49 thread changes later:



After 4 hours, there was still 6 thread changes left.  The completed design looks like this:

Well worth the effort.  Now I still have to convert it into a cushion, though.