Checked Wiki after seeing Stanley groups on flickr….looks like he is younger than I thought although can’t get the exact age without a copy of one of the books. Who knew that Stanley gets around so much…Clint Eastwood took him to the Oscars apparently and he went on the campaign trail with Schwarzenegger. Strange I have never heard of him here.…he’s famous…or a copy of him is.
Might have to censor the photo of him hugging my deco lady though….more appropriate photos in future Alyssa, I promise.
A very anticipated guest arrived today. He has been sent on a little visit by Alyssa from her class in New York State, USA. Now I told them about Australia’s very strict illegal immigration laws but he must have been desperate as he managed to get into the country with a] no passport and b] no customs check.
Now what does this say about Australia? That we believe so much in the “where the bloody hell are you?” ads so much that we will turn a blind eye to how you actually get here? I will be discreet however as he is returning to the US by 12th June…its a flying visit after all. He just wants to soak up the atmosphere and experience life in a foreign country.
Not that he will feel homesick…after all we have Foxtel and watch The View and The Gilmore Girls and Anderson Cooper and Conan O’Brien…as a matter of fact I will have to actively try to remember we are after all Australian. [Well with the standard of Aussie produced television there is no wonder we resort to the US variety.]
Speaking of entertainment he just missed out on seeing Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull with us. We saw it on opening day at the hugely comfortable Westfield complex where we are forever seeing film and television stars shopping incognito, usually with their families. Stanley should fit right in …he is persona non grata or an illegal alien to be more precise and they are trying to be invisible. We enjoyed the film enormously and have read online others hi Bombshell ….who loved it too..hi Stina
The Sun Herald gave it 5 stars…out of ten and generally rubbished everything released this week. Wonder what they will think of Batman…….ooh wonder if Stanley will be here for that….hope he’s mature enough to handle the Joker.
We saw Harrison Ford and Karen Allen on The View today and were impressed by them both. Karen said she was having the time of her life now in her fifties and when asked if he too was he said hell no…he had a lot more fun when he was younger. Wonder what that says about women that it takes until they are usually post menapausal or at least after the children are in college to really come into their own. I am sure Stanley and I shall have some wonderful chats on the subject. That is once I get him to leave my art deco lady alone. I realise she is a little underdressed for visitors but what can I say…if you’ve got it flaunt it.
[Photo on flickr, just in case ASIO or the CIA is monitoring the blogosphere]
The heart of my all time favourite throw started life as a brocade floor length skirt found in a local charity shop. Looked to me like something from the sixties or seventies and when my friend saw me with it she wanted half so I ended up with the back piece which was basically two pieces with the zip and a long opening in the middle. I had been collecting fabric for about a year since purchasing the first Kaffe Fassett hard cover book on quilting and have long been a fan of Kaffe since the early nineties when I discovered his wonderful designs and radical ideas for knitting via Glorious Knitting and Glorious Colour.
His astonishingly beautifully photographed book on quilting just mesmerized me and I spent many months drinking in his truly glorious colours and original takes on this traditional craft. After purchasing the skirt I realised that all I needed were a few selected greens and then I would have enough to get going on this throw. I had been collecting brocade from sample books for some years and had really wanted to replicate the colourway of the throw in the book, however when I found the skirt something clicked and I knew it would work with everything I had been collecting, just in case, for a few years.
I had a large piece of Liberty of London upholstery weight fabric that I used as a border for a door curtain so the hunt was on for the remaining pieces of that. Also from the charity shop was a formal shirt in gold silk brocade so I added that to the pile as well. Recently I had found some fabric samples from a new range in Spotlight [Australia's Joanne's] which were very deeply textured and patterned and also had some deep red jacquard which I had bought as a remnant. All I needed for the rest of the throw were the 30cm squares which I had been collecting for some years of gorgeous brocade samples in golds and reds and greens and some red floral fabric which I had bought several weeks before.
Once I started cutting out and arranging the top it was very quick to come together….I was held up for a few days when i realised that I needed another floral of some sort……. knew I had just the thing…somewhere and had to search the garage for them. The overall design was very easy and as a lot of the samples already had overlocking around them that saved me a lot of time, upholstery fabric frays a lot and requires some kind of stitching either before sewing the seam or after you see. Once I added a border, which Kaffe was not always adding in those days, it seemed to really finish off the top perfectly.
A week or so earlier Spotlight had just introduced a divine chenille….darkest red with gold swirls throughout…I just had to have it for the backing even though it was about $30 all told. That’s a lot for me as I usually use thrifted fabric or sale fabric for backings. this was going to be a leess expensive option anyway as I did not need wadding or batting inside the two layers as the chenille was so thick and heavy. I had been drooling over several throws at Laura Ashley and I was so excited by this chenille as it as even more lush than the ones in that store.
I slip stitched the border to the backing fabric and then top stitched around the inner border. It has been three years now of fairly constant display and during that time it has faded slightly so that it looks truly vintage…I even washed it once in case the dreaded mould had infected it and it came up better than new. After a few months I made a few companion cushions with some of the remaining skirt brocade and a tiny little piece of embroidered silk that as it was $185 a metre was all I could afford! The minimum cut was 30cm and I made every centimetre count! It is well placed I think in the heart of the brocade…..I think the woman who wore that skirt would wear something made out of that silk today…a little bit goes a long way and both the silk and the brocade are truly the stars of this throw!
Hope all the mothers had a wonderful day on Sunday. This past week I decided to delete my earlier blog entries as the photos had disappeared anyway and I didn’t have many posts on how I made the various quilts and those seemed somewhat outdated now. Also through my flickr use I am more aware of which quilts have been viewed the most and which quilts/throws non sewers find most interesting.
This week CJ taught me how to optimise my photos and I have actually remembered how to do it …..and retrieve them as well… poor CJ almost lost it when I asked where do I go to get them now? Always making things harder for myself than I have to! I am a good problem solver on the computer though…just keep trying until I get it right!!! Well apart from the emoticon thing and the google reader thing and the etsy thing and the uploading my own photos to WordPress thing…well its good for CJ to feel needed and that he has more knowledge than his mum!
I have also decided not to commit myself to a particular day or flickr group for thrifting and it might also have something to do with the person who runs that particular flickr group not being exactly cordial over the banning and photo links etc …but mostly because I do not want to feel that I have to go out thrift shopping especially for a certain day…the people who were waiting on my thrifting posts, and can you believe it there were, will see by the rss feeder anyway when I have done a relevant post.
Over the past week I found a gorgeous black sequined chinese style jacket by Maggie Shepherd [as new] for $8 which I promptly sold to a friend and a violet strappy top for $3 which she also bought. A gorgeous little hand painted glass candle holder for $2 and Jason Magnolia coasters for $8 [as new] and some assorted haberdashery items for $11…. everything cost $32 ..all in all a good hall and not just for me! I should have taken photos of the whole lot together and can’t now as my friend is probably wearing them in England as we speak. Will try to work out how to do the photo thing myself soon but do not want to overload my brain and in the process lose the ability to optimise. Whew, am sweating thinking about it!
At last I have something to show my loyal readers who may have forgotten this started as a craft blog. Blushing started life as part of a bag of scraps gifted to me by a friend who had quite a lot of bits and pieces. She has been making bags and scarves with her pieces and I was unsure for a few weeks what I would do with the strips as most of them were quite narrow…around 10 to 15cm with a few 25cm wide. I like the idea of table runners come bed runners come wall hangings so decided that it would be a challenge to work within the limits of the colours in the bag. I divided up the scraps into one large pile of medium to heavy weight linen mixes in taupe with charcoal and blush and another pile of beige though copper to peach rusty orange. There are also a few scrap strips which I have put aside for use in my strippy throws.
I sewed various strips of the taupe pile together after arranging them in some semblance of order, then pressed it and took a photo of it hanging from a cupboard so that I could get an idea of if anything needed to be taken out. Sure enough once I loaded it onto the computer I could see that one strip was standing out too much so I took that out and rearranged that area a bit and then it was time to hunt for the second hand yet as new curtain for the backing that I just knew I had somewhere in my garage! After about thirty minutes I found it and was delighted to see that it was even better quality than I remembered.
Then it was simply a matter of sewing the back to the front by machine and then I did some top stitching with perle thread to finish it off. All in all a simple project made challenging by the limited colour scheme and size of the pieces. We have however found that it is probably one of the most attractive things I have made, probably due to the quality of the fabric. It also goes incredibly well with our dark red curtains and has made the room have a more contemporary feel.
