Meanderings of a Crazy Quilter aka Jan Quigley

 Well the Dr Who outfit was a success, mind you I was sewing the buttons on the vest as Rowan was waiting to leave. Typical me! I kept procrastinating when it came to the buttonholes. I finally dug out the machine manual, followed the instructions, & they were fine. I haven’t done buttonholes for donkey’s years & have bad memories of a lot of unpicking. I should have just trusted my lovely machine.

The hardest part of the whole thing was getting the pattern right for the vest. I bought a pattern, & luckily traced it onto lightweight interfacing because a. I like to keep the paper patterns intact & b. it gives me a chance to check out the size. Thank goodness I did this, & thank goodness Rowan was home that day, because the pattern just didn’t fit. Too long & too small around the hips. Once I had the pattern right, the vest was easy peasy.

I knew if I tried to knit the scarf I would do nothing else, & my arms/wrists would protest loudly, so I decided to make it out of polar fleece. It took quite a few hours but I’m really pleased with it & Rowan loved it.

I laid it out on the kitchen island.

  Rowan wore the outfit to the cinema to see the new Dr. He said it was great.

Fortuitously a post popped up on Facebook with a link to cleaning your sewing machine. I knew I would need to clean my machine after sewing the polar fleece so this reminded me to do it I opened it all up to find this: Ewww! I cleared out all the fluff & oiled it & it looks, & sounds, a lot better now.

I have finally started on de-cluttering my life. I came across a 10 a day plan that really seems doable. The truth is I have 1000’s of things to get rid of, & because it’s all seemed so overwhelming, I keep pushing it to the back of my mind. But all this excess stuff is dragging me down, so when I read about getting rid of 10 things a day it sounded well within my comfort zone. I started on the garage on Friday, well I sat on a chair in some very rare Melbourne sunshine & directed. We filled 2 bins & a trailer with rubbish. Why did we keep all those boxes? Sorted out several bags & boxes of things to go to the charity shop, & sorted stuff to price up for my vintage stalls. We only dealt with about 10% of the garage but it was a start, & we could actually see a bit of floor. I’d really love to reach a point where I could put my car in the garage! Saturday Emma came to visit & took some large sets of shelves I no longer need, & I gave her a few things of hers that had been left behind when she left home 12 years ago. So an easy 10 things.

http://www.wisebread.com/do-this-one-thing-a-day-to-defeat-clutter-forever

I’m still working on my crochet blanket & have made some progress. I've actually done more since I took this shot but it's too dark now to take a current pic. Mind you, I’ve now mislaid my crochet hook, hard to understand when it stays next to me on the lounge, but I’m not quite up to crawling around on the floor looking for it yet. Meanwhile, I have started sketching up some ideas for the craft challenge I signed up for so I will get started on that. I have a few ideas, but all I know for sure is that it will involve lovely felt. I have a week so I should start today rather than waiting till the last minute……..

Update, I've made my challenge project, with days to spare, & will upload a pic on Monday. Oh & I found my crochet hook, it had slipped down into one of the large balls of wool, lol.

Rowan spotted this beautiful rosella in the front yard yesterday & grabbed my camera.