Annies Crazy World

This morning I headed off for the shops, I needed to buy a scrapbooking Album for the Pink Block and I had a Bead Street voucher that sharon gave me for Christmas.

I think that I have a love/hate relationship with bead shops…I love them and I headed straight for the charms where I chose to the value of the voucher…I hate them, as the girl was processing the voucher I looked down and spied a container of Christmas charms on the counter, need I say more…I am normally very restrained when spending money, I can go without a lot of things and I hate bead shops because they are the ONLY shops where I can’t resist spending, I control this by just not entering them very often because I really do love them.

Tonight I had a quilting friendship christmas party, one where we all take a plate and have a wonderful meal.

I decided to do a Chocolate Mousse, this is a small portion that I left at home for my Daughter.

We call ourselves the Allsorts and usually have Liquice Allsorts at our monthly meeting, I decided to have a little bit of fun and used premade icing and melted chocolate to make Chocolate Allsorts to go on top of the Mousse…

When I bought my new camera I knew that it would put pressure on my computer system as the image file size is much bigger than my old camera and my computer resources have been low for a long time, today my hard drive reached capacity…fortunaly for me a friend, who knows more than I do about computers, was staying and knew exactly what I needed…If I had known that it was as simple as purchaseing USB Portable harddrive I would have got one months ago, as it is we went shoping and I purchased one that has 4 times the capacity of my internal hard drive so I have space for a good many more images..and I love the racey red colour of my new storage disk.

Dentists aren’t commenly connected to crazy quilting but for me they are or at least one is…Visits to the dentist with my daughter used to be Very traumatic for both of us until she started seeing Dr T and his assistant E, 2 very special people, they talked to Jessie about things she was interested in and got her confidence so she didn’t mind going which took the trauma out of going to the dentist…and as they got to know us and what I do they started saveing the little bottles for me and every visit they would give me a few…we haven’t seen them for a while and the today I was in there to see another dentist but we passed Dr Tang in the corridor and he said Hallo, and could I wait a tic because he had something for me, he went back to his surgery and came back with a bag of little bottles, he is still saveing them for me which I think is really lovely…These little bottles from the dentist are my favourite bead bottles.

I clouded and/or scratched the plastic of a few bottles trying to remove the labels from the round ones, in the end it turned out easy to remove them the trick is to soak them in soapy water, overnight so that the water can soak in under the plastic coating, then let the labels dry before soaking them again for a few hours after which the label simply peels off.

My Bead Storage is based on small bottles including purpose made bead bottles, my dentist bottles, perfume bottles, medicine bottles and any other odd bottles.

Originally I stored the bottles in chocolate boxes, they are now stored in stationary draws…There is enough flexability in the plastic to pull the draws out of the unit, I use plyers to snap off about half the little plastic bits that are there to stop the draws coming out, leaving just enough to catch so that I know the draw is nearly out but allowing me to keep pulling so that the draw comes out as a tray.

I line each draw with cotton batting so that the bottles don’t rattle about when I am using them.

Holiday Snaps Day 24

I am not going to get my pink project finished before I leave so I am packing it up with threads beads and other bits that I will need and will take it with me…Finding a few of the charms and a particular piece of braid, that I want to go around the top part of the photo, required some serious sorting to be done, the boxes on the left are the ones that needed to be sorted the boxes on the right ready to sort into.

I was picking my neice up from school again today so I left the sorting until she was here and after having a cup of tea and a lamington for afternoon tea we spent about an hour sorting what was in the boxes…we didn’t get through all of it but this lot is ready to be integrated into the storage draws, a job for when I get back from holidays…and I did find the charms and braid.

When we had put everything away for the afternoon we went for a walk in the garden, while out there she picked a red Camillia and presented it to me, I said I would float it in a dish and we went to look for one, it looked good in the one we found but needed more with it, and more and more, it grew into quite an arrangement and when I said to her that we should photograph it she arranged a whole setting for the photograph.

The sewing machine in its new location, it does cover the bottom half of my design board but the heater on the wall on the left side of the image no longer works so it can be removed which will gives me a good big wall to put a new design board which has the advantage of being able to stand back from it….and haveing design board behind the sewing machine may well be handy, the pink fabrics are pinned there so that I am ready and set to…

…Sew.

On the back and the front of the foundation fabric I marked a line the size of the photo and another 1/4″ inside for the seam allowance.

I ended up with only one seam that will need to be hand stitched.

On the last seam in the bottom right corner I wanted to keep the curve of the gold glitter pattern on the fabric so I cut around the part of the disign that would be lost in the seam, I then stitched the seam up to it and jumped over it to finish the seam, I then gently pushed that part of the design back through the seam and used a little bit of fusible webbing to hold it in place.

I am not going to get this finished, as I had hoped to, before I go on holiday but it is at least well started.

Most of today was spent in the garden where I did gerneral cleaning up while a friend pruned the bush.

Tonight I have been stretching a friends embroideries ready to put into frames.

My Storage System has always been based largly on Boxes, partly because they are cheap, partly because I simply like the boxes, partly because I had never seen a acommercially available storage system that I liked the look of…that is until I purchased a Stationary organizer for my printer papers, and I found myself eyeing it off, thinking that it would be good to store the beads in, one day I emptied out the paper and filled the draws with beads and some charms, the image above is the first organizer on the shelf with may boxes…

I liked it, I went and bought another 4, one for the paper and another 3 for charms, kept finding different things I could store in them and bought another 2…it was some time before I went to get another one and found that they had changed the design of the draws, the new ones actually keep the paper more dust free but don’t stack well and they are bigger…I shopped around and found a store that still stocked the ones I had and bought 3 sets, which I stacked 3 across and 3 high and they have been the one spot in my studio that has been organized.

Last week when I put them on the top 3 shelves of a cupboard I thought another 3 sets of draws would be ever so handy and I headed of to the shop just hoping that they would still have the same ones…when I found that they did I bought another 6, which gives me enough to allow for uture expansion, I have put things that can be moved elsewhere, as I need them for beads, charms and threads…I will give you a peek into the draws as I get them organized.

with some serious fileing planned I purchased a box of 300 clear plastic sheet protectors and 5 pastel coloured Manilla Arch folders.

I have put my quilt portfolio stuff into the pretty coloured folders and will use the missmatched black ones for other less important paper work…

I also purchased 2 cardboard flat pack file sorting boxes…they fit on this shelf so well that they may well stay there but my primary purpose for buying them is to facilitate the sorting that I need to do.

At least for a while I will be able to find a pen, that works, when I want one…As I was moving things out of my studio I put every writing implement that I found into one box…I then went through the box sorting the contents into pens, pencils, etc…I sharpened all the colouring pencils…and then tested every pen, the box on the right are those that have been thrown out.

I found an old floor plan that I had done of my studio and have traced it twice and drawn in the furniture to show how it was and how it is now…The original was done on graph paper so it is to scale, the grey furniture stayed in place and I have colour coded the furniture that I moved…Strangly it wasn’t till I had moved the table that I realized a BIG Advantage of the new set up is that none of the cupboards are obscured by the table, before when I had to pull the table out, shift chairs aside and reach at awkward angles to pull the box I wanted out and because it was such an effort to get them out I tended not to put them back so the cluttered the floor until I did a clean up, now it is easy to pull them out and just as easy to slip them back into place so it should, in theory, be easier to keep the room clean.

As for the nook of shelves behind the design board and Sewing Machine, getting anything out of there is a real wrestling match as the whole floor area is piled with boxes and bags on top of which I have put anything else that I have wanted to get out of the way quickly…when my little helper below, was leaving she pointed in there and told me (with a twinkle in her eye) that it was the next room that I had to organize…My little helper is my neice and whilst she may be little in size she was a big help today, we sorted and put away the contents of several boxes of accumulated bits.