New Bags!

What a great sewing day I have had today! I LOVE days like this. I made this little Civilian Backpack Purse for a good friend of mine here in Alice. She and a couple other friends here in town are big Vera Bradley Fans. This is my rendition of one of her (Vera Bradley) bags. Apparently she no longer makes it, so I took a stab at it. I am crazy for how wonderful it turned out! Now I am biased. I really like my work. I have a Vera Bradley catalog, she makes some pretty cute things, but I have never been really wild for her fabric choices. Isn't that crazy? I guess that is why I like my bags better. Oh and Vera died and her family is now running the company and Wendy says they are being jerks. This is heresay....but there you go.
I also made this little wallet this morning. It is so cute and tiny! It is sorta like the one I carry. Mine is bigger and made from the softest leather. My husband got it for me at the Heidelberg Christmas Market. I think I am going to make another one for me....we will see.
We hiked up Mt Gillen yesterday. My legs are killing me. This is after I went for a little 2 mile jog. I have decided I am tired of my body not being nice and firm anymore. And my morning Sun Salutations are only doing so much. We are going to be a fit family!
Look at all the things you can stuff in the new wallet? So darn practical! OK, now onto books....I am very disappointed with Kite Runner. I have given it chances. I have been a good reader, but last night I read the last of it that I am going to read. I threw it across the bedroom. That is it. Tambur, this was a terrible book! Yuck! Should I really give it one more chance? I just don't want to deal with little cleft lipped boys being raped. It is just too horrible. I am just going to cancel my vacation to Afghanistan (just kidding, there is no way my husband would go with me there, I will just have to wait until I get reactivated in the Nurse Corps). This is why I normally stick to Romance Novels. Does anyone have any good authors to suggest?

I am going to go eat dinner (grilled lamb and salad) then I will finish this post.

I am back!

HI There ya'll! I am back and feeling a bit better. Thank you so much for your kind wishes of a speedy recovery. I had the flu. Wow, when I get sick I don't mess around! I rarely get ill, but when I do, my life just kinda comes to a standstill. My husband and I were both sick, but the kids only got a touch of flu. They were quite happy to try to cook with the microwave while I was trying to nap on the couch. Kinda hard to rest and recover when the 3 year old has taken it upon himself to make popcorn.


I was so proud of myself for getting so many bags knocked out last week, but now I am behind again. Waaaaaaa waaaaa waaaa. Anyway, this is what I have been working on lately. It is a crib bumper to match this quilt. I still need to put the ties on it so it will look pretty and still be secure. I have never made a bumper before and I am pretty pleased with how this one turned out.

I doubled up the batting between the layers and it really makes the quilting stand out. The Shot Cottons are tissue soft now that is has been washed and dried. I think my next quilt will be out of shot cottons only. They are so pretty.
Today was ANZAC day here in Australia. What is Anzac day? Well, it is sorta like veteran's day in the states, but it primarily remembers the 8,000 Australian troops and 2,500 New Zealanders who were killed on this day back in 1915. That is a lot of men killed in battle. Basically the Aussies and New Zealanders landed on the wrong beach and were massacred while getting off their boats. Please understand that I am not the most politically correct lady in the world nor am I a History Major. I am sure that there are those of you out there who have studied this battle in more detail than I have.....so please feel free to make comments.
There was a parade in town today, so we went. We almost missed the whole thing due to me being inside the coffee shop at the time. It was the fastest parade in history. I was just planning on watching the parade, but my daughter took it upon herself to sprint up Anzac hill behind her daddy, so instead of shouting for her to come back (which she would not have heard anyway) I got to take the hill too. The boys and I were quite a bit slower, due to MR stinky feet wanting to ride on my shoulders and the Middle man trying to collect bits of broken glass and lizards along the way. When we finally made it to the top, it was very hot and crowded (crowds make my skin crawl). and my daughter was sitting crossed legged right smack in the middle. We stayed for the wreath lying and speeches and are now home....hopefully my little tribe will decided to take a nap so I can get some sewing done.

It is great to be back!

xo

Tia

The rantings of a sick woman

I have lots of things to yammer on about this evening. First is my thanks to my mother. A true fashion Huntress. She sent me these pants (Ralph Lauren) after waiting for them to go on super sale. When they reached $20 she bought a pair for herself and me. They are men's pants, but come on....what man to you know who would wear them? Maybe I don't know any gay enough. I LOVE them. Holy Cow the little fingers in China who made them for me (or Bruce) were so darn skilled. I wonder what I would charge for making a set of pants like this.

Here, get a look at the detail.... reverse applique, wonky log cabin quilt blocks, hand embroidery. Yes, they are big, but I can pretend like I didn't finish off all the Lemon bars from the other day when I have to roll over the waist of the pants a couple times.

Here is the bag I finished today. I LOVE it! Well, I love most of the bags I make....I am like a proud momma and her little babies. I just love them all. This one is made with some wonderful Charm by Amy Butler. I have been hording this fabric for sometime....and finally decided to lay into it with my scissors. I am very happy with how it turned out. I hope K. Abbe is too!

So this is what I will be reading over the next week or so. Yes, I know I am all over the place with my reading preferences, but I like to read. I have started Kite Runner and Dead Until Dark. Both are pretty good. I have also flipped trough the Lotta Prints book. That will be fun when I can get my feverish mind to focus. Oh yea we are sick. Most of us are. I don't get sick....it is in my job description, but I am sick for some horrible reason. There is an out break of Measles at Emma's school. MEASLES!!!! I thought that was irradiated! So, since we have all been immunized we just get something similar to the flu. Sam has some little spots, but that may just be a rash. Stu and I are dragging around the house, but as soon as I go to lay down here come the boys ready to scratch my back or they need help with something like using the microwave....Yeah that gets me up out of bed pretty quick. I just hope to get them in bed early at night, then I can try to medicate myself and get some good sleep.

See here are 2 of my fellas crashed on the couch. Sam LOVES his backpack and keeps it stuffed full of cars and trucks and trains and his friends and snacks. He even wears it to bed. See the red mark on his neck? That is where it rubbed due to him humping the big, heavy, German Corkscrew and a glass jar of pear nectar around for a day.

Even the truck is sick. Our friends went to town to get a battery for it and it needs something to assist in the ignition of the Glow plugs....all I know is that it won't start, so I have been stranded here at the house with a sick husband and sick kids. Oh and I feel like poo too, but I have some good reading, fabulous fabric and cool pants, so I really can't think of many places I had rather be here in Alice Springs.


Speaking of Alice Springs....for those of you planning your Outback Holiday her in The Alice, there are some pretty fun events coming up. The Beanie Festival, and the Desert Mum are two of my favorites. Plus this is getting into the camping season, all the flies die off and the snakes hibernate, so it is a good time to go out bush. Now, for some reason there are Heaps, Stacks of Aborigines in town. They are from different tribes than the ones that normally hang out at the bottle shop, so I guess something is getting ready to go down. I will keep you posted. I will have to dedicate a post to indigenous photographs and their stories. It may be too shocking though. I will do up a rough draft and see if it is something the world needs to know about or not. It really is pathetic, so it may just make you too sad. Alright, I am rambling...hey, I have a question. Does Martha Stewart Still have her brand "LIVING" at KMART? I wonder if she knows about the KMART here that is totally ripping her off. Maybe that is Blog Fodder too?

Cheers, gals!

xo
Tia

I Love Lemon Bars!

The day before yesterday one of the limbs from our limone (hybrid of a lemon and lime = bigger juicy limes with no seeds) tree broke off due to it's heavy fruit burden. It just so happens that on the same day I was blog surfing and found myself looking at some lemon bars over on Angry Chicken. They looked pretty darn good and I got to thinking about them more and more and decided what the heck, I have a zillion limones and plenty of butter...and I have a sweet tooth, so I made limone bars. Now, this is a recipe that I have adapted from several different ones. Mainly "Citrus Bars" from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook. And Amy Karol's favorite recipe


These are really gooey lemon bars. You are going to want to keep them in the fridge to firm up. The consistency is similar to Lemon Merange pie (without the merange) and a really nice shortbread crust. I don't have a food processor, so I take my rings off and mix it by hand. So, without further ado....my version of Lemony Goodness....



CRUST


3 Cups of flour (all purpose)
1 Cup of Powdered Sugar
1.5 tsp Salt
3 sticks butter

squish all that together with your fingers...unless you have a food processor and if you do use that. it will be the consistency of dusty peas. Press into a big baking pan (I use my 13.5 x 9.5 x 2 baking dish. I am limited in size due to the fact that I live in government housing in the middle of Australia and I have a hilariously small oven. You will do better if you have a bigger baking dish and a phat Viking Gas oven....but you may be like real me instead of fantasy me, so the glass corning casserole dish will do just fine) Put it in a preheated 350F oven and bake for about 30 minutes.


FILLING


8 large eggs
4 Cups of Sugar
3/4 cup of all purpose Flour
1.5 cups of fresh squeezed Lime/Lemon juice
About a tablespoon of zest from lemons or limes (whatever you used)

Wisk all together and Pour over mostly cooled crust and bake for about 15 minutes. I put crumb topping on mine to soak up some of the filling. then put back in the oven for another 30 or so minutes (I say the same thing below...I hope my redundency is not too confusing)

Crumb Topping

3/4 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) chilled unsalted butter

Squish or process this until it is gritty. You will sprinkle this over the top of the lemon bars after they have been baking for about 15 minutes. Then you will put the pan back in the oven for another 20 minutes. When the buzzer goes off check to see if the filling is firm in the center. Cool it completely and sprinkle with Powdered sugar and try not to to gorge yourself with this goodness. As a matter of fact have some skinny friends lined up to share with.

This is my new mostest favoritest bag. I a wild for this combo!

xo

Tia

Our new friends House...Maybe

Yesterday we went exploring. Well, OK, we broke into the yard of what might be our new friends house. She wrote me and told me the potential address and I went and scoped it out. I will happily snoop for you. My mom and I used to break into houses to explore....isn't that horrible? Well, it was really fun as a kid, and for the most part we never got caught. We never did anything bad, just wanted to look around old abandoned houses.


Anyway now that you know a little more about me, add snoop to the list. The kids and I like to check on the fruit trees in the empty houses around ours. We bring our baskets and pick when everything is ripe. I will have fresh lemonade at a moments notice all year. If for some reason all the food trucks stop their deliveries out here my little family will survive. I am not desert crazy enough to start killing wallabies yet....that can be my husband's job. I am the gatherer he can be the hunter.


Back to my friend's house. She is going to have some great citrus trees. On the right is a grapefruit (I just ate one for breakfast and it was wonderful, nothing like fresh citrus), the one on the left is an orange of some sort. She also as a massive grape vine that with some pruning will produce some nice fruit, I bet.

The family who lived here before must have had a gardener among their numbers, look at that frangiopani (spell check had no idea what I was trying to write, sorry about that) tree...it is going to smell wonderful when in bloom. The bed is a little overgrown, but housing will square it away before our friends move in.
Well this picture is out of order...this is a headband I made from the scraps of this little quilt. I will need to work on the dimensions...it looks like one of those hats the good Mennonite wives would wear at my High School (One of my high schools was a Mennonite High School in Honduras). See another odd fact about me, wow I am really sharing today.

So here is a sampling of the flowers at our friends new house. I love the elephant plant in the middle man's hot little hands. I planted those cuttings in my little pot garden. I hope they root well. OK, I am off to sew some more. I am thrilled that my last zipper bag is done for a while. I am finishing up a crib bumper at the moment, hopefully there will be some good pictures of that up soon....it is going to match this crib quilt. Alright, have a great rest of your day and I will talk to you later!

Cheers!

PS, thank you for supporting me in my zipper hatred. Sharlene, the backpack you ordered for your little squirrel is designed to have a zipper, so that is no problem. Don't you fret your pretty head about that! It is when I change a design to incorporate a zipper that makes me downright loony. All my little bag designs are so set in my mind is is hard to change them sometimes....does that make sense, it is like getting up on the wrong side of the bed, or driving on the wrong side of the road, possible , but strange and not always safe.

My un-natural hatred of Zippers.....and crowds

SO this is what I have been working so hard on for the past 3 weeks. The bags in and of them selves are not that challenging...but there were a few differences with this order that was quite driving me mad. Well not really mad, but made me want to procrastinate. It is made from a flightiest, and they are very strange to sew...the fabric comes alive and slithers all over the place. Makes me wonder what this fabric would feel like against ones bare skin. Would it give you the creepy crawlies or would it feel like a soft touch. They can't possibly breathe well, but the few I have worked with have not smelled like sweat. Maybe these fellows are just cool characters. OK, why did these bags take me sooooo looooonnnnnnggggggggg to make? Well, it is because of this....
The Zipper. I HATE zippers. I have a right side of my brain and a left side. My zipper part is in neither. I think it is somewhere behind my spleen. I have to think completely different when I have to adapt a design to incorporate a zipper. The Zipper part of my Brain is like some pathetic wounded beast. It is cranky, unpredictable and just wants to be left alone to die. I had to coax it out and humm to it and stroke it....I even had to go to the beauty shop and get my hair cut to settle it down enough to function properly. Despite my hatred of zippers, I think this one turned out pretty well. On either side of the zipper is a lovely tiny quilt made of strips of Amy Butler's Earth and Sky collection. Every last bit of Earth and Sky I posses is now either used up or spoken for (I need to remove it from my fabric gallery). I have one more bag I need to adapt to incorporate a zipper and after that I will have to refuse all zippers in the future. Not because I don't like how they turn out, but they just put me so far behind with the rest of my bags. I have to spend so much time rethinking design, I just can't do it anymore. Now the little zippy wallets are another story all together. They are designed to have a zipper and are quick and abnormally fun to make, so those zippers will stay in my world. These 2 ladies I am making zipper bags for are really great women. Patient and always so sweet. They are a joy to sew for and I will sew for again in the future in a heartbeat, if they want me to.


I also don't like crowds, but I think that is because I am becoming a crazy desert woman. But instead of cats, I collect fabric and spare BDU legs. Soooo, now onto my last zipper purse ever. When that bugger is finished I think I will have a party. Well, we actually had one last night and one the tallest chaplains in the US Army came and played guitar with my husband. We have had lots of visitors in the past 3 weeks.


Oh, one more thing. At NO TIME are your husband's uniforms being held hostage by me. If you think I am taking too long on your bag, please let me know and I will happily return your uniform and refund your money. No worries, believe me! There are lots and lots of gals out there sewing their little hearts out trying to make Army bags, maybe they can square you away faster than I. Who knows? On that note, I am off to lure my zipper beast out into the open.

xo
Tia

And the winner is....

Thank you so much for your opinions on the political race and the candidates running for President. I do feel so out of the loop way down here, so it is great to hear what you are hearing back on the home front. I employed my ultra high tech method of selecting a winner for the Maria Zippy Wallet and the lucky lady is Shelly, commenter #12. I will send you an email in a bit to let you know and you can choose a Campy style wallet or a civie style one. I recommend Amy Butler's new Midwest Modern....I LOVE it. I do still have some of your husband's uniform if you would like to to use that.
This is a wonderful new book. If you are a crafty book lover, this is a great read. She gives some great history on the cotton industry and some great wisdom as well. I first heard about Natalie Chinin from my sister. I loved to look at her lovely Project Alabama clothing...but all the sudden she disappeared. I haven't gotten to the part in the book where she says what happened, but I am LOVING the book so far. So much great inspiration, wonderful pictures and some great projects too....I don't know that I will be attempting all of them, but the bandanna is a sure thing.
I posted a tutorial about my method of quilt basting on Flicker. It is also over in the tutorial section. I get lots of questions about it, so I decided to take some pictures while I was doing my latest quilt. I had more glorious plans for the tutorial...but the kiddos had other ideas. It is my recommendation that you do this hateful quilt step when all of your young are happily tucked in their little beds.


That is it for tonight, I have so darn much sewing to do. This is going to be a very busy week. If you have sent me emails about bags and I have not gotten back with you, just email me again. I start replies and then something comes up and I dash off to take care of what ever it is and forget what I was doing before....bla bla bla I am sure this is the same situation most moms are in. Just send me a reminder, I am not ignoring you! I LOVE you all!

Oh Happy Mail Day!

So....this arrived today. Yep, my first shipment of Midwest Modern. Holy Crapola! It is stunning. I have a feeling alot of you ladies are going to be changing your minds about your bag fabric when I get all that I ordered. I got this from repo depot. because I just was unable to wait for all that I ordered to arrive from my fabric Co-op. Oh there are some more shot cottons in the pile from Kaffe Fasset and that ugly stuff on the bottom of the stack is for an experiment....I won't share too much until I have a picture to back up what is flitting around in my mind.
From the first moment I saw the pictures of this fabric collection I saw a quilt made with this group of prints, along with a pure white and a pin dot yellow. So, soon I am going to take the time a sew for just me. I will of course finish a bunch of bags first, but sometimes it hurts my brain a bit to have a phenomenal inspiration in my mind and not be able to let it out.
That is what happened with this little doll quilt. I originally had something totally different in mind. So strong in fact that I loaded up the truck with kids and husband and camera and drove way out into the bush to take pictures of the mountains at sunset....I wanted the special light you only see for a couple minutes....and it just lights the mountains on fire and all the vegetation transforms from scrubby old desert grass into this magical forest of possibilities. I think of the 60 pictures I took only one almost captured that "moment"...anyway, I am doing a doll quilt swap over on Flicker. I have never done one before, so I wanted to do a good job. I dyed some of the fabric myself with tea, coffee and mud...I wanted a very earthy pallet and even sketched out my plan (I almost NEVER do that). Then I decided to cyber stalk my partner a bit...well she does not like abstract quilts, which is what this was going to be. OH poo. No sweat I can regroup, but I had to do it quickly! So the above is what I came up with. Very traditional, ultra feminine, Awesome Japanese prints from Lecien (I have stacks of Lecien pieces....I just LOVE them. So many I do not have them on my fabric gallery. There is such a softness and grace to them.). I boardered the little blocks with my hand dyed linen (the one with tea) and I think the linen really added a great texture to the ultra delicate prints. Oh well, I need to get dinner (grilled lamb, salad, and grilled sweet potatoes) going. I hope my partner likes the little doll quilt. The other one is still swelling in my imagination, so it will have to be made soon. But I think I am good to return to my bags for now.


I am going to do my drawing for a free zippy wallet on Friday, so you all be sure to give me your take on the front runners for the President of the US and what their action will be towards Iraq.


xo,
Tia