Countdown!

Who remembers Countdown from the '70's?  Oh, the anticipation of Sunday night at (was it 6.00pm or 6.30pm?) [insert magic time here], waiting for JPY to come on with those incredibly tight satin trousers, all those guys with the bad hair, just hanging on for 20 years waiting for hair product to be invented & but doing amazing things with hairspray and lard (honest, I'm sure I read that somewhere...) while they were waiting, and then, Molly, poor sad Molly, trying to be so serious, so deep, so meaningful, and nobody wanted to listen to him, he used to make me cringe when I saw him with 'real' rock stars (ie, not home grown) & you could see how they were looking at him going "who is this guy again?".  Ah, the memories.  Sherbert, Hush, Dragon, JPY, Skyhooks, Ted Mulry Gang... 


And why, you are asking, is she rambling on about Countdown?  Because, gentle readers, I am on the slippery slide down to 100 posts, the magic number when special secret secret special things happen, for you, out there.  Of course, it won't quite be like the joke my husband told me about West Virginia (he lived in the US for a couple of years & has some interesting stories...), the punchline is "oh, just you and me"... it'll be much classier than that, and it will involve one of these:

Made just for you, named, of course, Centurian.  Unless you think 'Count Down' is better.  Oh, that's quite clever, really.  Sometimes I surprise even myself.  

And of course, instead of the 'A' (for Aster, see previous posts if you really must absolutely have to can't live without knowing), it'll be a 'C'.  

And now, the real reason for this post (as my lovely wobbly friend over at Fluid Pudding says, the best bit is always at the bottom, you have to show real dedication & devotion to get here) (and of course the reward is sooooooooooo worth it) is that the shop name for me at www.madeit.com.au is not IsabellaG (that's just my username, apparently) but is - wait for it "Isabella Golightly".  Whoda thunk?  Go, browse, enjoy.  And if you note the amazing resemblance of some items to some other items currently listed in some other online store, well, keep it to yourself, will you?


Ciao! 

Madeit!I

I just found Madeit & have registered for a shop - sadly the shop names are limited to 9 characters (why is that?) - so I had to make do with IsabellaG - but I'm sure those who want to find me will be able to!


I've listed just a couple of things, and may move away from Etsy if it works out - not that I have anything against Etsy, but it is so Americentric, and they have some policies I'm not that happy about - but I hadn't seen an acceptable alternative until now - anyway, if you have spare cash & want to purchase some of my beautiful products :-)), give MadeIt a go & let me know what you think...


And these turned up today, after 6 weeks - I'm really happy with the quality and the price (100 zips for US$25 (works out about 33 cents per zip, a real bargain) but boy, six weeks is a long time to wait!

That's it for me, having escaped from the office at 6.00pm for the first time in 3 weeks, I'm going to have an early night.  Yay!

Heads up...

for a full house (yes, I know, it's "eyes down"), but sometimes you need to keep your head up so people can't see things they shouldn't...


And I say this because my lovely friend Romy just sent me an email about her hair - sorry reply not longer looked in a shop mirror today. roots! arrghhh. big time. no time to get to hairdressers, teach tomorrow (head down, talking), fight with management thursday (head down, negotiating), uni event friday evening in ballina - unknown people, probably all tall and looking down on my head.

so, ooops, look, dripping hair colour on desk...

Funny.  

I think we should all stop colouring our hair in Movember, you know, when the men grow their moustaches.  We could raise a lot of money for Beyond Blue, I reckon, with people paying us to do the dyeing deed.  Why is it that your hair always goes grey in the wrong places?   I want to be like Mary Kostakidis, who has the most gorgeous silver streak in her hair, and instead I look like Pepe La Pu's feral girlfriend Penelope.  Ah well...

We had a fabulous long weekend in the Hunter Valley, beautiful weather, great wines, some neat sewing stuff, plenty of quality dog time... and the cheekiest kangaroos I have ever seen!

And this is Bruce; he's the boss and he's about 6' 10" and very very scary - my friend Kaz says he sometimes turns up outside their shed at dusk - imagine if you ran into him putting out the garbage (and look at him facing me off - very glad I was 100 metres away!)...

Then we did a bit of sewing - the original of these came from Country Road, and it was a simple enough exercise to measure up that one & make another one in lovely apple & spot linen from here:

And then we made another, longer one for the bigger wallet...

in the gorgeous Eiffel tower material, also from here, and then I made this gorgeous (imho) pouch for Clara - who is la francaise herself...

and I had a bit of a glitch with the label - I wanted to put it in the bottom left hand corner, it just seems to be the most aesthetically pleasing there, but I still haven't come up with a foolproof way of calculating where it needs to go to allow for the boxing of the corners - and so I had to take it off & hand-stitch it on afterwards - but it doesn't look too bad, does it?

And then I persuaded Kaz to resurrect her blog, which was a brilliant move, again imho, because she has some beautiful photos & should be sharing them with the world - Post more piccies, Kaz!

She's baaaack!

My lovely friend Kaz, at Prettydog Vineyard, has resurrected her blog!

And from the sick bed..

I've been itching to make one of these for myself for ages, and after knocking up the one for Gill on Saturday in an hour, thought I might make myself one - just large enough to put my phone in, some credit cards, some cash and a clip so I can attach it to my Day Job door pass, and then I can go hands-free at lunchtimes... I get a bit concerned sometimes that I'm going to leave either my phone or my wallet in a shop, and this way, I don't have to carry anything at all!

And I also appliqued my initials on it, all three of them, which took longer than making the whole pouch... 

But it came out quite nicely, I think...

Ciao!

Happy (early) Birthday to you...

Well, after no posting for 2 weeks (was it really that long?, I'm now posting like a mad woman.  Of course, being tucked up in bed at 11.00am will do that for you, it's a good way to ward off the boredom, although I just bought a copy of this:





which has some very beautiful lace knitting patterns in it, just the thing for somebody with a short attention span...


Oh, you want to know why I'm in bed?  Well, the cough which has been lurking in my chest for the past week is trying to get a foothold in my lungs & I'm determined not to let it... so at the insistance of MWH, I am staying in bed & keeping warm.   I will be up later to go & make some more stuff, I've got those orders from MWMIL to make, and although I made one small box pouch yesterday (without taking any photos, shame on me), I want to get the others made & off my list.  


The other thing I made yesterday was a small version of that nice linen & floral print flat pouch with the hand appliqued flower on it, and I have packaged them up nicely to go off to Gill in Brighton... was much happier with the applique results on the smaller pouch, but of course I forgot to take a close up of it... but the pair look really nice together:

I did a little French knot in the middle of the flower, and some stitching round the orange blobs in the middle... they looked so nice I was tempted to go up the hill to Cottage Quiltworks and show them (because I got the fabric from them) , but I'm sure they would have looked at me like I was a crazy woman...


One of my colleagues is going to Brighton for a conference in August, and she has very kindly offered to hand-carry the parcel for me - nice!   I I love Brighton, it's one of my favourite places on the planet ...

What's not to love?


Ciao!

I know, I know...

Where the heck have I been?  Well, nowhere, of course!  I've been really really busy with "the day job", as one of my favourite writers refers to it, (Sharon Lee, if you must know, of Lee & Miller, and the Liaden Universe, fame), and I've been too pooped to drag this infernal machine out of its cocoon & write anything!


However, I have made solid progress on the wedding bunting:

so now you know what all the work is leading to - 72 6" X 9" rectangles cut out, 30 letters traced, cut out and appliqued onto the flags, 72 6" X 9" rectangles sorted into 3 sets of 12 ("melspaceandspaceurby"), carefully making sure that the same fabrics don't end up next to each other, the colours look okay and the letters are all the right way round... stitching, stitching, stitching, pressing, pressing, pressing... so all that's left now is to make the 'string', which is 8 feet of 2" binding cut by hand, per set, pressed (pressed, pressed) then carefully pinning the flags onto the 'string', and even more carefully stitching it together... phew.  Not that it hasn't been fun, but just quietly, I'll be very happy when it's finished.  Good thing the wedding isn't till September!


Other makings:


I bought some beautiful linen from Cottage Quiltworks, at Bilgola Plateau the other week, and the most gorgeous cotton print for the lining - and I made this, but I haven't worked out an infallible method of calculating where to put the applique (which you have to do first, so the stitching doesn't show inside the pouch) so that it's in the right place when you make the boxed corners.  Man, that's a sentence and a half... anyway:

And it's lined with this (excuse the crease!):

Gorgeous, and with this beautiful ribbon, also from Cottage Quiltworks:

Now, what to do with it?  Maybe an early birthday present for my friend Gill in Brighton (UK)?... hmmmm...


What else?  Well, I just spent a fruitless half hour searching the Lotteries site for MWH, who had a year and a half's worth of dead lottery tickets jammed into his beautiful Italian black leather ticket holder that I bought him at Rome Airport in 2003... mine (red, surprise surprise) is still its original size and shape, because I never use it for more than two or three bus tickets at any time - and his is about 1cm deep!  - and I found one lousy winner, for a whole $20.  Won't be going back to Italy any time soon on that, needless to say.   


Oh, and yes, I must shamefully admit to caving in and buying that beautiful red square handbag I have been coveting at Diane Van Ooi's gorgeous quirky shop in Newport, for some time... I got a large sum of money from the Guvinmint by taking in a bunch (and I do mean a bunch!) of doctor's receipts to Medicare, and I thought, well, why not?  I'm just doing my bit for the economy, honest.  And I can hear them trundling that guillotine down the road right now... ah, come on, there's just no such thing as 'too many red handbags'... is there?


And I just wanted to add that I love this woman's blog - even though she goes to church, she seems fairly sane in a completely insane kind of way, which proves, I guess, that religious beliefs don't turn everybody into nutcases, maybe just those who were already sliding down that slippery slope?  I had a funny religious moment of my own this week, with a bunch of religious orders and organisations having booths (stalls?  sheds?) in the main pedestrian plaza of this fair city - they were proselytising, which is a word I just love for the inherent complications of its pronunciation... it means "actively hustling for converts"... and as I was wondering up the hill towards "the day job", I overhead a trio of MIS* commenting that "they must be looking for recruits".  My comment?  "Where's the one for Jedi, that's what I want to know!".  Much assorted laughter, and a very amused "that's made my day" from one of the suits.  Mine too.  And so, gentle reader, here 'tis.  


And that, tonight, is it for me.  MWH is happy because his team has won its match, and I am glad to sitting here, burbling away, listening to beautiful Derek Bell harp music, and watching big men in maroon dance around each other... okay, stopping now.
*Men In Suits