Annies Crazy World

This is the Winter Wonderland Cake that I made for My neices 18th Birthday…You Can see a bigger image on flicka

She had no idea that I was making it and was Gobsmacked when she saw it…

The finishing touch is that when I turned on the power the fire glowed, large image on flicka…To make the Electric fire I covered a shallow box with glad wrap and placed it upside down under the cake, I cut a small hole in the box to fit the light from a small lamp and I cut a slightly larger hole in cake so that I could place a shot glass over the globe to protect it from the icing…Once I had the structer in place, see image of naked cake below, it was simpley a matter of crinkling a small piece of red cellophane and placeing it over the light with a few twigs and flake chocolate rocks.

Below is an image of the Naked Cake that shows how I built up the shape and the hole with the shot glass covering the electric light bulb.

Cake anyone…It didn’t look so good after the party but it was the funnest cake I have ever made.

The frosty icing is made by dribbling boiling sugar syrup into beaten egg whites…It was a bit tricky to make but after 3 batches I had it mastered…It is a lovely icing to work with, very, very sticky and Ohh so yummy.

My website and most of this blog show my crazy quilting but from time to time I do do other things…One of those other things is the making of miniature and micro miniature quilts both traditional and crazy.

This weekend I have pulled the miniature box out and started making microminiature quilt brooches that I can put into the Canberra Quilters Sales Room at the Annual Quilt Exhibition in a couple of weeks time.

I am hoping that blogging them will help me achieve my goal of having 20 made for the exhibition sales room.

These 2 quilts are not crazy but some consider me crazy for making them lol

The one on the right measures 2 3/4 inches by 3 inches…made from 1/4 inch squares

The one below measures 1 5/8 in by 1 7/8 inches…

This image is for Bob so that he can see that his apron is being worked on, which is what I am doing today.

The First thing that I wrote onto my To Do List was Shoe Block for Lynne…being an appliqued shoe on a 6 inch Pink background and I knew that she would like a high heeled strappy shoe like the ones I wore with my Bridesmaids dress

To get a pattern I photographed my shoe, resized the image to fit the block and elongated the hight just a little to make it look even more elegant….I nearly took fright when I saw just how small the pieces were but I have appliqued tiny pieces in the past so decided to give it a go, it was fiddely but I am glad that I perservered, the image below is actual size.

I made tiny roules for the sole and straps and I used a piece of leather for the upper sole at the front …when I went looking for the string of red sequins I found the bag of sequins but there were no red ones in it, I am sure that I have some but had no idea where to even start looking and decided that it would be easier and quicker to buy some more but first I asked Sharon if she had any, she had loose red sequins and as I was thinking that it would still be easier to buy some that where already stitched together, she found some that where smaller, making them better scale for the size of the shoe, as well as being a better colour to match the fabric in the shoe which made it worth sewing the individual sequins onto a ribbon, having decided to use them Sharon had to teach me the backstitch to sew them on with…for the buckle I pinched a short length of my son’s silver wire and bent it into a buckle shape…I was only hoping to make something that looked like a buckle and I was delighted to find that though the spike that goes through the hole doestn’t move like a real buckle it does work so that the buckle can be done up and undone.

I gave it to Lynne at tonights Canberra Crazy Quilters meeting, all the members of the group have made her a shoe for a significant birthday and now that she has mine she will be able to make them up into a quilt

I have been helping my sister make a commission for 2 Black Kimono style summer dressing gowns with the chinese symble for love appliqued on the back and a smaller size on the front.

Canberra Quilters Annual Exhibition starts tomorrow and I have pinners fingers tonight from pinning the quilts out on black screens…whilst the fingers might get a little sore it is a great time to get to know other members of the group and we have a lovely day…..

The Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) wanted to make a quilt to celebrate Australian citizenship, they asked people to make an 8″ block depicting what being an Australian means to them…My friend Lynne H knew exactly what she wanted, she wanted her convict ancestors convict details written in brown on a cream background, she tea dyed the fabric to get an old parchment colour….and in the foreground she wanted a mast and sails with a bit of a ships deck and rail with her great, great grandmother looking towards her new home….So she knew clearly what she wanted but didn’t know how to acheive it which is where I come in, as her personnel technical adviser (LOL)….She came over one morning and we spent a lovely day discussing techniques that she could use….a flat applique would have worked quite nicely but not near so well as the stumpwork that we did use….I showed her how to make little rolled sails and she took it home to prepare the background and applique the mast and sails….In the meantime I thought about how to construct a her great, great grandmother…Lynne had chosen a burgandy silk for the skirt (an offcut from my bridesmaids dress) which we crinkled by twisting wet fabric and leaving it twisted untill it was dry, for the shawl we had tried several different fabrics none of them seemed right, then we realized that it was probably because the where all to fancy for a convict girl and a piece of plain green silk fringed at the edges made a perfect shawl….The Hair was the tricky bit, Lynne liked the way I had used my hair to stitch my self portrait on my Stumpwork Sampler and she had some long locks of hair from her son…But allas she could not find them…Could we use her hair??? its a bit short, 2″ lengths are to short to thread into a needle and stitch….but what if…Lynne, beautiful, crazy lady that she is, didn’t mind having a gap in her hair for the sake of art, so I was able to cut of a few locks and experiment, I made a tiny stumpwork head and shoulders, tied the locks of hair into bundles, stitched the locks to one side and reinforced them with glue so that they couldn’t pull out….at this stage of construction it looked like our little lady was haveing a bad hair day.

But it turned out to be more manageable than what I had thought, a little more glue on the back of her head to hold the hair securly and a few stiches with a strand of my my long hair was enough to hold them all in place….

Lynne added the stars in the form of the southern cross to symbalize australia…

….Lynne’s block was selected for the citizenship quilt and last wed I went over to DIMIA with a group of Canberra Quilters to help tie the blocks together…great chance to get a good close up look at all the blocks WOW…they will all be put onto a website which I will link to when its ready….

Sometime in July, My Golli got finished and when we visited Sharon he took us back to childhood as he slide down the hole punch and had us giggling after I took this photo because, instead of sliding down, he catapulted up into the camera Lens.

My little beaded project is taking shape…the pattern is in Jill Oxtons book Beautiful Beading for beginners and beyond.

Nearly finished…I think that it is cute that these little beaded figures are stuffed with just a tiny bit of filler.

For my Visual Journals I prefer hard covered bound books and to prevent my them from breaking there bindings, as they get fat from what I have glued to there pages, I remove pages from the centre of each section…last week when I wanted to help my son start a Visual Journal it was the pages that I had removed from mine that I grabbed to start his…tonight I have been stitching the sections together to make them into a new book….I had forgotten how much I enjoy bookbinding.