Craftapalooza

hiya!

Well hello there! It's been about 14 days since my last post! Hope you're all well. Melbourne was fun. Though I admit to missing The S and being a bit of a girl about it. However catching up with old friends Al and Di and meeting new friends like Jo, Sooz and Suse was a blast. Getting to squish Pia was also lovely, she's a gorgeous little bebe, so squishy and sweet. Also meeting other crafty bloggers was fun, thanks to Justine and Nikki for organising a great afternoon. Though Justine was a blur most the afternoon running around after us ladies. Thanks Justine, Amitie and Lovely Liz from Broderie. Justine's pics....

I had the pleasure of having dinner with Fran and Emma, we had a great night. You know when you've made a blog friend and you're not sure if in the flesh you'll actually have anything to talk about. Well, we had no problems, both really delightful, fun, witty and intelligent women.

The day before I was due to fly out I decided that I HAD to have a new bag. Pattern adapted from this book and it came together pretty quickly. Fabric and handles from the stash. Photographed on the plane on the way to Melbourne.

Finished some socks, modelled here by S. Can you pic which pose is her's and which is the one I "made" her do?  Pattern from My Fashionable Life, but can't find the name of the pattern at the moment. Details, Lorna's Laces, think it's Bittersweet colourway, knit magic loop style on 80cm 2.5mm addi, toe up, short row toes and heels. What more could a sock knitter want? My first lace ever.

The next installment of back-tack will be happening soon peeps, soon. Al and I only had a short amount of time in Melbourne together so we didn't get to chat, but we have plans. So keep your eyes peeled at our blogs and at the back-tack blog.

Now if you'll excuse me I have about 1400 posts to read in my RSS feed. EEEP!

BT3 - flickr gallery live

Yep, you read correctly, the flickr gallery is up and lookin' good. Get on over and check it out.

Thanks everyone for playing. Check out the full post at the back-tack site.

BT3 hopped in...

Lovely Alicia as she's know around these parts spoiled us rotten. She sent us Nell, Spud and I love her. She's so sweet and extremely well made, OMG the itty bitty french knots, INSANE. I love her buttons Alicia, I'm assuming they're vintage.

The only PROBLEM, yes, I'm sorry there are problems, is that Nell wouldn't sit still for her photo, she was so excited to have moved to Australia, even though the plane trip was a little hairy, quite long and damn cold in that luggage hold. She's figured out she's nicely coordinated with my teacups and won't get out of the display cabinet.

Spud and I thank you, Spud thinks he has a new buddy to hang out with, sad but true the life of an indoor kitty cat.

back-tack3 update

Forgot to mention in the last post, back-tack is drawing to an end! Participants reading this get on over to the BT site and read this post. There's a prize up for offer and since the post Hillary's also been kind enough to offer up a little something else with her bookLET....let's just say something a little soft...

Get your pictures to us people and good luck!

BT3 landed

The bunny has landed with Kelli, so glad she likes it, I refer to it as "it" I don't think it's a she or a he, it's an it. Go figure. I was so happy to be creating something for Kelli, she's stepped up to the plate previously as a BT angel. She's taken some excellent photos, thanks Kelli.

Would you like to know the details? Here goes.

We have a double sided dress using Lynn's pattern. I've modified it and it closes using a hook, the ribbon just wasn't working. The dress is reversable, one side has red velvet with a coordinating itty bitty yoyo. The BHG pattern was also a little painful, there was no way I was going to be able to sew the legs in the way they suggested so I improvised, stuffed the body and legs and stuffed the legs in the body and slipped stitched them in by hand.

The other side of the dress I created a pattern of sorts using the blog addresses of BT3 participants. I've used a different inkjet product from previous, can't find the link at the moment, the results are heaps better, a much finer detailed print.

There are five buttons! Two for the eyes, two for the arms and one bellybutton. The letter K, where is it you ask? Why it's on the bunny's butt of course, NO reflection on Kelli at all, Kelli, you know this ;) . That's about it for the details. This time around I stuffed with some undied wool roving I have and it's a much better stuffie as a result. More dense, less lumpy, very happy.

Can you see the resemblence to JaJa Binx? Unintentional, but it's there.

Full set of pics on flickr. So people get your pics into us by the end of the month so we can launch the BT gallery on the crafty world.

finito sneaky peaky?

Yep, finished up my BT3. However I'm not going to show you all the details just yet. Don't want to spoil it for Kelli. Anyone else use the BHG bunny pattern? Little bit tricky, but I'm very happy with the final result. Kelli, it'll be winging it's way over to you later this week.

Sneaky peak up the bunnies smock, ooh err vicar. Whatdya mean bunnies don't have belly buttons?

Details and more revealing pics once it's landed in another country.

funk

Yeah in a bit of a funk this week, it'll pass. Still adjusting to living by myself again. Relying on me to feed me and the cat, empty the litter, clean the house, buy the groceries etc. LOL I could go on but that doesn't make good blog reading! Probably one of my challenges of blogging, what to share and not to share, life is not all roses, but it's also as hard or as easy as we make it.

So on to crafting. There's been knitting. It's getting cooler here in Perth so the frantic winter knit, which probably should have started a couple of months ago when it was stinking hot, has begun.

I've just finished Flora for myself. Knitted in a variegated silk (from Emma, can't find the ballband to show you the yarn) and Habu silk/mohair (from Al at 6.5sts).

When I'm in a funk I tend to bake, which is a bit of a catch 22 as I want to eat the bake, which doesn't help my hips! However I made Nigella's Snickerdoodles. YUM, yum, yum. Ver y nice straight from the oven and also once they've cooled down. Ridiculously easy to make with satisfying results. We won't talk about how many I've eaten! I searched on flickr the tag "snickerdoodle" and was pleasantly surprised by the number of images that turned up.

Here's the recipe.

Snickerdoodles

How to be a Domestic Goddess, Nigella Lawson ISBN 0-701-16888-9

250g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg (EDITED - I used cinnamon instead)
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
125g butter at room temp
100g plus 2 tablespoons caster sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon cinnamon

Preheat oven to 180C

Combine flour, nutmeg, baking powder and salt and set aside for a moment.

In a large bowl cream the butter with 100g of sugar until light in texture and pale in colour, then beat in the egg and vanilla. Now stir in the dry ingredients until you have a smooth, coherent mixture.

Spoon out the remaining sugar and the cinnamon onto a plate. Then with your fingers, squidge out pieces of dough and roll between your plams into walnut-sized balls. Roll each ball in the cinnamon-sugar mixture and arrange on your prepared baking sheets/trays (you need baking trays lined or greased).

Bake for about 15 minutes, by which time they should be turning golden-brown. Take out of the oven and leave to rest on the baking sheets for 1 minute before transferring to a wire rack to cool. (Umm and at this point, you MUST eat a couple whilst they are warm, I just *cough heard that this was a good thing to do).

Makes about 32

Itchy vulva's whipped up and back-tacked...

Wow, thanks to those of you that've signed up for BT3, that was very quick and a little scary! Alison had an eagle eye on the emails coming in thick and fast, all signed up within 1.5hours approx. Phew.

I'm on leave this week so I was snoring my head off whilst you guys were signing up, then I forgot the signups were THIS morning and had an "oh crap am I supposed to be doing something moment"...But all is well!

We had the IV's retreat this weekend. It's our third year in a row and it's more and more fun each time. Our namesake Madge and her vag couldn't make it, however she sent a massuese over with a massage chair and we had a 20 minute massage each. Heaven. Thanks Madge.

The food was excellent, nutritious and trashy, perfect. Rob made an excellent kedigree, I've never had kedigree before and hers was delish. It was salmon, egg and yummy spices like cumin, tumeric and garam masala (I think!). Perfect. Em made homemade icecream. I whipped up a chicken and corn soup for lunch and Gayle cooked terrific eggs sunday morning.

Knitting, yes there was knitting. I took 4 projects but worked on one only. My Rosy that's about 2 years old now. I've just about finished, I hope to block and sew her up this week. Even though the cotton angora sheds like mad, I love it. It's so soft and squidgy. Glad the weather's turning cool here.

We also had books. Em bought along the Happy Hooker, One Skein and a couple of other's I can't remember. One Skein has my number. Excellent projects and interesting too, not at all what I expected. Definitely one for my personal collection. I bought along Jeffrey Yamaguchi's 52 Projects, he kindly had sent a review copy. Excellent book for creating your own projects. I particularly like the little side projects on the edges of the pages. One was to write a letter to you 64 (I think that's correct) year old self, my version would be on the 1st of each year write myself a letter and post it to myself, then on the 31'st of December open it and read it. Would be interesting to see how the year has progressed. You could write a list of goals that you'd like to achieve, or make it about fitness or creativity. Up to you. I think I'll try it next year. Alternatively you could do it on your birthday each year.

Oh and can you believe this?! I rang 3 local video stores wanting to know which Doris Day films they had available....EVERYONE I spoke to didn't know who Doris Day was! Now they all did sound like they were born in the 1980's or 90's but still. I still cannot get over this, Emma was even asked to spell Doris, LOL. So no Doris fest at the retreat.

AND Whip Up's WHIPLASH is starting later this week. You game enough to try? Go on, great prizes to be won.

You wanna see some pictures from the weekend? Here you go.

Yes, yes, I know the google hits I'm going to get with that title!

BACKTACK3 REVEALED

You keen? You ready? You wanna know what's going on?

Welcome to BT3 - our third run of the very popular Backtack series. We think we've come up with something which will really get people to think and create within some tight parameters. By restricting what you can do and use we hope to get some amazing interpretations from some very creative and clever people (umm, that's you guys by the way).

This time we'd like you to make a softie.
But not any softie.
The softie can be any pattern, but we've found three we'd like you to consider using first. Mainly because they're cool patterns, but also because we think they'll work with what we want you to do with the softie. Hillary Lang at Wee Wonderful's has very kindly agreed for us to use her two free patterns for the wee bunny and the pointy kitty. Don't go downloading the patterns from Hillary's site, we'll email them to you with your matchup, we don't want to go using Hillary's bandwidth! This is extremely generous of her, and we know her patterns will be fantastic for this. If you use her patterns we would appreciate you respecting her rights as an artist, her ideas, and her patterns and do not alter them. Second, we have a pattern we will make available only to those who sign up, again for copyright issues. We will tell you it's a very cute bunny pattern, very sweet and quite easy.

The softie has certain restrictions though. You could sense some catches coming couldn't you?! This is where we get tough. These are all non-negotiable, so read this carefully, because we want you to make the softies in a specific way.

1. They must be made from black and/or white materials. How much of either you use is up to you. It can be plain, or patterned. It can be knitted, felted, plastic whatever your imagination comes up with. We want you to get creative here, and think outside the box.

2. 1 additional colour - and one only - may be used, but it cannot comprise more than 20% of the final piece.
3. The softie cannot be any higher than 20cm
4. You must attach 5 buttons of your choice, in locations also of your choice, to the softie.
5. You must include on your softie somewhere the first initial of the person you are sending this to. So if you are sending to Sarah, you must have a letter 'S' somewhere on the softie. Again, use your imagination.

Clear? Good. Out of sameness comes diversity, and just as every snowflake is different yet the same, we hope to get many different, but same, softies. This isn't to everyone's tastes, so if it's not sitting well with you, please don't sign up.

If the concept grabs you, and we hope it will, we'd love you to sign up. But first you'll need some important information about dates and stuff. The following are set in concrete and we will be strict about them.

Sign ups: Start 9.00am Australian EST on April 11th. That means you need to work out your time zones, time differences and date differences. That time and date should allow everyone a chance to sign up. Do not attempt to sign up before hand. We will delete all emails attemtping to pre-sign.

On the 11th April we will post that sign ups are open on the backtack  blog only. In that post will be a new email dress specifically for signing up. We will only take sign ups from that email address, so take a careful note of it. The address will not be made public prior to that date. Sign ups are limited to 100 people - we cannot cope with more than that number. If you believe you had pre-signed during a small window of opportunity to do so last year, you will have received an email from us already asking if you still wish to be involved. Those numbers will not be included in the 100 places available. If you have not received an email from us, you need to sign up as instructed above.

Matchups: Will be made and sent out to reach you by 18th April. Be ready to play…

Playtime: Because we begin play 20th April with a finish date of June 10th. You must ensure your finished goods arrive with their person by June 10th.

If you can't make those dates, will be travelling, or moving house, or you know you have some life issues coming up, we'd like to ask that you carefully consider whether being part of this is a good idea for you. We take it that you signing up is your commitment to this, us and your partner. You are part of a chain, and it is upsetting and rude to not deliver on that commitment. Similarly we expect you treat everyone involved with respect, compassion and manners - email regularly, let us know if there's a problem as soon as it happens, email to let your person know their parcel has been sent, and email a thankyou when you have received yours. Small amounts of kindness go a long way.

As in previous backtack's we require you to have a blog - don't have one? Start one now! We expect you to post regularly, show us what you're doing, and post what you sent and received. We also require a maximum of 2 photos of finished product be sent to us for inclusion in the flickr album. More details on that later though.

We hope you'll get excited about this, and look forward to seeing you all play!

YOU READY FOR ANOTHER BACKTACK?

As sands through the hourglass, so too are the days of our lives, and we come to find that once again we are on the cusp of another backtack installment. Alison and I have been working on a slightly different backtack experience for BTIII. It will be a challenge for some of you, but a whole heap of fun as well, and when we put the final results together in a flickr album, you'll understand why we set what we did.

You didn't think we'd tell you right now though did you? Oh no. We're much more sneaky than that. On the 5th April we will announce BTIII - on both our blogs and on the backtack site as well. We will tell you then exactly what you will need to do for this one, exactly what we require, and there will be explicit instructions to comply with for signing up and for playing. We urge that if you are interested in playing, that you read that post very carefully. The new backtack button above gives a huge hint about what is in store….

And if you're keen, follow the sign up instructions on the backtack website on the 5th April NOT BEFORE because we'd love to have you all come and play.