Christmas in New Zealand

A lot has happened since I last posted. I graduated, for starters! After graduating, I headed to New Zealand for a holiday (my older sister bought a house there), before returning to Australia for work. A year later and I am back in New Zealand, once again for a Christmas holiday.

My younger sister and I made a gingerbread house, as is tradition...


Only this time, it featured banana-wielding ninjas, among other details....

You could, in fact, call it a ninja bread house! Badoom boom ching!

• Recipe for vegan gingerbread
• Recipe for vegan royal icing
• Gingerbread house mould
• Ninja bread men cookie cutters

It's been lovely to kick back after a very full-on year. I have been crafting, just not blogging. I hope to share some of my creative work from 2011 in the coming months.

In the meantime, I got up to a little crafting here!

My older sister and I bought a sewing machine for her house last year, and I calculate it has made about 80 Morsbags. To liven things up, I decided to make a little pincushion-in-a-basket. I picked up the cute basket from Trade Aid and the fabric is left over from making Morsbags.


I winged the pattern and ended up having to make the insert smaller. Let's just say that it's a good thing that the basket is curved and you can't see the edges where I brought it in!

Also, it was fun stuffing the cushion with scraps of fabric (I had no filling), but it does mean that there's a bit of resistance when it comes to pushing in the pins. I'm sure it makes for an efficient pin bluntener if nothing else!


I'll leave you with a picture of some of the decorations up in my room here in New Zealand. On the left, the 2012 Frankie Calendar (a Chrissie present) and on the right, a tea towel I picked up from a local op-shop. I'm loving greys and greens at the moment.

Happy new year, everyone!

Intricate stencil work

So... my crafting hiatus didn't last very long. Ahem.

This is not my artwork. A friend of mine gave it to me after I complimented him on it many years ago. Now a special event of his is coming up, and yesterday was the 9th International Morsbagging Sunday, so I decided to print some Morsbags with his design on them.


I painstakingly traced the design onto freezer paper and cut it out (nothing like a looming deadline to make such tasks seem attractive). Doing the leaves and the basket was extremely fiddly.

Seeing the freezer paper ironed on the bag briefly made me consider screenpainting the design in white rather than black!

This was the first print. I made two, because I wanted to make the most out of all that cutting! As you can see, it's the inverse of the original artwork. It was simple because, as you can see from a couple of photos back, it was made from a single cut-out.

Here is the second, more fiddly bag. For this one, I ironed down all the remaining cut-out pieces one by one.

I had originally planned to add some of the finer details (flowers, petals, hair...) with embroidery thread after painting the bags, but I've decided that they look good as they are, and the threads would probably just snag on the inside of the bag anyway.


The labels went on the back, as there was no real place for them on the front.


Here's a little visual reminder of why you need to place some newspaper (or my favourite - cereal boxes) under fabric that you're screen-painting so that the ink doesn't seep through.


For the presentation, I rolled them up and tied them together with a simple tie I made from the same linen I used for the bags.

The linen was picked up for next to nothing at my local op-shop and was so beautifully soft and easy to work with, that I fear I will not want to sew nor print on anything but the best!

Everything has been packed away again, so hopefully I can get some uni work done now. Although when I went to bed last night, my mind was racing with ideas for doll joints and projects using them... uh oh!

Cute as a button.... cuff-link!

I am not posting because I've found a great new tutorial, nor do I have something something I've made to share with you... It's just that these cuff-links make me happy! I bought this shirt from an op-shop recently and didn't realise until I got home that it required cuff-links.

Fortuitous, then, that I dropped by Shop handmade for some retail therapy, and found these cuties by Lilypad Designs.

My local op-shop and recycling resources in Australia

I have become a bit of a recycling nut of late. I love sifting through the clothes racks, finding something I like, and getting that little thrill when I realise it's in my size.

My favourite op-shop in Canberra in Y's Buys in Kingston. I swear I'm in there several times a week. It's really small and has a high turnover. Also, it's cheap - the clothes are at least half as expensive as the ones that you find, say, at the Salvos in Fyshwick. They know me by sight, as I'm always sifting through the fabric bucket, sewing supplies, teatowels and pillowcases. I also go there to donate Morsbags. I love that they keep so many crafty things... today I picked up a big bag of polyster polyfill, a large wooden hoop for screen-painting, and a bunch of elastic, sewing machine bobbins and safety pins... all for $2!

Here's some of my recent loot...


Random lace, antique ribbon, old buttons... I'm in heaven... I'm always eyeing off their hugs assortment of knitting needles too, but I can easily restrain myself as I don't know how to knit yet!


I also thought the cross-stitched pots on the - what is that? A centerpiece for a table? - are cute. And so much of my summer wardrobe has come from that op-shop. Today I scored the cute singlet top pictured.

On the subject of recycling, Planet Ark runs a fabulous website on how to recycle and/or dispose of things correctly: Recycling Near you. It's got info for every state in Australia, and answers common questions like...

• whether you can recycle drinking glasses
• how to properly dispose of cooking oils
• where old clothes can be dropped off to be made into rags
• whether you need to wash jars before recycling them
• when events such as kerbside collection and "Big Aussie Swap" parties are taking place
  

... and much much more! Definitely worth a look.

---

Related post: Morsbags