Crafting around our house

This week has been another hectic one, the lowlight of which was Ava having to spend a night in hospital. Thankfully it turned out to be just asthma (not the originally suspected pneumonia) and she is back home again in very good spirits.

With all that going on it has definitely been all about Ava lately and we have been doing fun and crafty things to keep her busy (and still, gosh does that child like to run!)

Gran bought Ava some plasticine and so we all had fun playing with that for a few hours.

Grandad (FIL) made piglet's head

Mummy (me) made a pig

Gran (MIL) made a duck and Grandad made a snowman

We let Ava play too, she made this cave/tent to go with Gran's worm

She also made her own worm, a bridge and I think the one in the middle is a backpack for the duck (it later went to the moon in a rocket ship)

Gran also bought Ava this cute little egg painting centre.

We painted paper when we ran out of eggs

One day we had to go to the transport centre to register the cars. The lady gave Ava a large stack of paper. When we got home we used to make origami and cut outs. Grandad's silhouette of Ava was the only one that I seem to have captured.

In our house (of 4 adults and one child) we all love cartoons. My parents in law used to work in animation, so they have an excuse. Ava is 2, so she has an excuse. My husband and I are just big kids at heart though! A series that we all love is Avatar. Our favourite character is Appa, the flying byson.


Unfortunately you can't seem to buy the Appa plush in Australia. No problem for my father in law though, he'll make his own for us! So far he has finished Appa's head wich you can see below.

The pattern is made just from looking at the drawings and he is made from mainly recycled soft toys.

I have also finished the pattern for my sloper, but I haven't cut or fit it yet. I bought some fabrics which will hopefully end up turning into something soon!

This is a blog post!

Okay so I have been a bit slack with the blog posting! A lot has been happening here (not all good) and it fell by the wayside a bit. :o)

I've still been doing lots of things, just haven't finished anything. I realised this morning I have too many things happening and not enough things finishing. I need to just sit down and concentrate, not get distracted. I just find lately when I sit down I think of 50 more projects that I would like to try and start doing those instead!

On my sewing table at the moment I have:

• A dress for Ava
• Pants for Mixie
• A shirt for Ava (I ripped the arms of yesterday because I didn't like them)
• Dress for Mixie
• Coat for Ava

The first three could be finished in about 40mins of sewing each and the last two have a lot of work to do.

On my computer I am in the midst of resizing two patterns for Ava and learning how to draft patterns from scratch.

If you haven't noticed already, I do have a tendency to be a bit.... well.... cheap. I don't like paying for something I could make myself. This manifested itself quite badly last weekend when I went on a bit of a baking frenzy. This week my interest has been in pattern drafting. I like the idea of making something from scratch, truly creating it. I looked around the internet at a couple of courses, books etc. I was particularly interested in Kenneth King's book on The Moulage, but patience is something I lack and waiting for a CD to arrive in the post would be unbearable. Eventually I found this site called Vintage Sewing which has a great little book on pattern drafting. I know its not exactly modern, but I like the learning process. I have been doing the drafting in Adobe Illustrator. Its good because I can select a point, and draw a line x length at y angle. I have been using trigonometry to work out the angles of the sloping lines. The theory being eventually I will write a program to draw these lines for me and exact math will be needed. I haven't printed anything out yet, so I haven't tested the sloper. Haha hopefully it will work!

I started back at uni this week as well. I'm doing a computer science degree. I hope to minor in maths, but it still a while before I get to pick.

No pictures today, sorry.