leebee tells it like it is.

Finally am getting my rear into gear regarding Oliver's birthday party - invites went out yesterday by mail, the hand delivered ones will go out today and Thursday.



I've bought the decorations but they require assembly. I'll start baking cake this week to freeze, and I need to do some batches of sugar cookie dough too.

I finally finished Oliver's quilt, aka Sail Away I. You'll recognise the fabric from Matthew's quilt - that was going to be for Henry initially which is why I cut two quilts from the same fabric, but then Henry's godmother Sam made him a gorgeous quilt for his birthday so I used the fabric for Matthhew instead.



I'm not totally convinced - I love the binding, but I think I preferred the coin layout on Matthew's. Oliver adores it though, so that's all that really matters. It was a complete pain in the bum to stipple, I planned to do irregularly spaced straight lines (like I did on 2d Zoo I the other week) but broke my walking foot when I went to start sewing it. Using the regular foot was not an option as its backed with cotton and the back would pucker like mad. So I had to stipple it. Its way too big for my little machine too, I ended up doing it in two halves, but it was a battle.

In retrospect I should have made it 5" wider and 5" shorter but it was my first single bed quilt and I was winging it. As I said, Oliver loves it, so that's all that really matters at the end of the day anyway.

So 3 odd years ago I blogged a recipe I was trying. I never bothered to come back and tell you how delicious it is! Its such an easy thing to make, its a little bit time consuming because its baked twice, but the actual time spend beating/mixing etc is short.

I've made a few changes since then - I've tried it with walnuts instead of pecans, which was nice but the walnuts were very strong. I'm not sure if I needed to reduce the quantity, or if my walnuts were a bit past their prime. I've since replaced the walnuts but I haven't tried making it again. I've also made it with almond meal which is delicious.

So here it is with my (subtle) modifications.



Pear Tart v2.

Base:
1/2 cup butter
1/3 cup sugar (I used white, caster would be nicer no doubt but don't have any)
3/4 cup flour
2/3 cup almond meal OR same amount chopped walnuts

Melt butter, mix everything together. Press into greased medium size tart tin. Prick with fork. Bake for 40min at 180c.

Filling:
250g cream cheese
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon vanilla paste (or the seeds of 1 vanilla bean, halved and scraped)
1 egg
1 tin pear halves, drained and sliced
Cinnamon sugar, to dust

Beat cream cheese, sugar, vanillas and egg together until smooth. Spread evenly over cooked base. Arrange sliced pears on top and dust with cinnamon sugar. Bake for 60 min at 180c.

Allow to cool before serving.

Tastes so good, looks like you've spent hours in the kitchen cooking (as opposed to hours doing other things while you can smell it cooking!), its a winner IMO. I made one today for tomorrow as we are expecting visitors - poor Henry will have to have something else because there's egg in the filling.

Meet the new Minkie Baby spokesmodels: from left to right we have Noah wearing Apple, Isabella in Pink and Henry in Turquoise.



Aren't they adorable? Squee!

It hasn't even been a month and I've changed the Sakurako logo already. I went to order the promotional and packaging material for it and decided I vastly preferred the ready-made options than my own attempt. Its not that my own was bad exactly, it was just a lot more cluttered than I'd have liked. Plus, the soft pink looks better than the reds I used, and I like the new font better.



I have postcards with washing instructions, business cards, and round stickers (for sealing up the tissue paper the quilts get wrapped in) on order. I also ordered Minkie Baby washing instruction cards, return address labels, fluffy mail stickers and promotional postcards with the new logo on them. And because it was only $2, I also got myself a Minkie Baby mug for my tea.

2D Zoo I is finally finished. After the amount of piecing involved with 2D Zoo II I was a bit sick of looking at the fabric so this one sat fully pieced and pinned to the batting on Elliot's desk for a while. Since its such a minimalist design I thought the meandering stipple might be too much and decided to do some irregularly spaced straight lines instead. I really like how that worked out and will definitely do it again.



No pillowcase because I didn't have enough fabric left of the zoo print or stripe to make one. Its priced accordingly and is on sale via the Sakurako FB page.

I definitely won't be doing a meandering stipple on a big quilt ever again - I broke my walking foot somehow when I put it on the machine to do Oliver's single bed quilt so didn't have much other choice but the stipple it and it was such a pain. My little machine isn't built to do it on something so big. Its done now though, it just needs binding then it'll be another thing off the UFO list.

I also finished my labour dress from Oliver finally, thank God that's done (almost 4 years later) and out of my cupboard where it was in pieces.

Other than clearing up UFOs I'm also trying to use up/get rid of random fabric. I'll have some ruffled lightweight scarves for sale in the Kat & Bee Ozhandmade store shortly made out of chiffon, organza and silk. I've got some PJ/lounge pants cut out of the leftover nappy flannel for the boys and some fabric dry to dip-dye them in for an ombre effect. Once I've cleared off those two projects I have a number of other quilts in the planning stages, in no particular order:

1. Cogsmo x 2 - Robots, rockets, and cogs (one for Sakurako, one for Felicity's baby)
2. Summer Picnic x 2 - ladybeetles and gingham, red/green/pink (one for Sakurako, one for Leanne's baby)
3. Something for Stephanie's baby (no idea what)
4. Sugar & Spice cot quilt - red/aqua/pink, flowers, dots, paisley, argyle
5. Peter Pan Kokka pram quilt - red/navy/cream, Peter Pan
6. Happier pram quilt - pink/green, trees and birds
7. Safari Tots unisex cot quilt - yellow, brown, blue, green, safari animals
8. 2D Zoo single bed strip quilt (last of this fabric!)
9. Grey & yellow single bed square/rectangle quilt
10. Grey & yellow cot strip quilt
11. Joel Dewberry Modern Meadow quilt for our bed

I'm itching to start them but need to finish the other things first and clear out some old fabric I'm never going to use which is taking up room.

In other news, I'm the guest blogger at The Sewing Sisterhood each Wednesday, managing the Photo Challenge. I'll probably also contribute some other posts during the year, not sure what yet.

Anyway, time to wind up, Oliver is bugging me for my (Andrew's) laptop so he can do Reading Eggs. He's obsessed with it at the moment.

Since we are on the cusp of the Minkie Baby website going live, let me share with you our super cute, adorable, squee-worthy new logo:



Adobs right? <3 <3

The nappies are due in very soon now. O_O The website is in progress. Photos have been taken (though we need more). I've ordered the wetbags but they won't be here until mid to late Feb. Still trying to find a supplier for flushable liners who will do the quantity I want (ie not 20,000 rolls!). Bank account is sorted, AP is giving me the run around as usual. rolls eyes I've got to sort that out this week. Also need to find somewhere in our little house to store 2 pallets worth of nappies. But yes, its all happening now at Minkie Baby HQ.

Happy New Year, etc, etc. Also, Merry Orthodox Christmas if you happen to be Orthodox.

I've been having a little bit of trouble with my beloved Mac laptop lately. Lots of Spinning Circles of Death happening, lots of script errors in Firefox. I'd upgraded Firefox and added a new tabbed browsing add-on which fixed a lot of the script error issues but not all of them. Lappy is almost 4 years old which lets face it, in the world of technology these days is getting long in the tooth, but I'm not in a position to go out and buy a new one right now so I was hoping to get through for another ~12 months.

Then I went looking for a simple collage-making app online (like PicFrame, which I have on my iPhone) and found out that a) there's an App Store for Mac computers/laptops (!!!) but it required a system upgrade to at least Snow Leopard; and that most of the apps on the App Store required Snow Leopard anyway. So I couldn't put off an upgrade any longer.

Elliot insisted on doing a backup of my laptop before doing anything as it'd been a goodly long time since I'd done one. Not the photos - they get backed up automatically - but everything else needed to be done. So he did that overnight on Tuesday then went to do the upgrade on Wednesday.

And that's when Compocalypse 2012 happened. Lappy threw a tantrum and flat out refused to boot. We'd get the Mac Noise (ding!) and the apple come up then nothing. We gave it time (I've had mac products do a Lazurus-like return from the dead before, alas not my poor iPhone 3GS which I dropped in the toilet though) but still no go. At this point I'm praising Jesus and thanking Elliot profusely for backing everything up. Because of the backup I took the prospect of being lappy-less very, very well.

Elliot decided we needed to call in the experts to try and get it going and got Andrew to come over. Saint Andrew of the Spare MacBook came over to work some hoodoo on Lappy and try to get it booting. He did in fact get some stuff to happen - I'm not sure exactly, I think maybe it was some sort of safe mode because some diagnostic stuff came up which confirmed Lappy was, indeed, b0rked. But never fear, audience, for the Spare MacBook referred to above is in fact a spare and Saint Andrew is happy to lend it to me indefinitely as he has a shiny work MacBook. He and Elliot set me up with my own login and copied everything from the backup over so its the same as before except shinier and SO MUCH faster than Lappy did.

In other news, I'm doing Project 366 this year, also known as Photo of the Day. My photos are all on FB here which should hopefully work as I've tried to set the album as public. I might set up a separate Project 366 blog and link to it yet.

First photo was taken at Athol Beach on NYD:



Its all iPhoneography via Instagram but I like Instagram'd iPhone photos, so there.

ETA: http://365project.org/leebee/365

2011 - Year in review, quilting style.



Top Row: 2D Zoo II
Middle Row: Quite Contrary I aka Freya's quilt(gift), Baby Elephant Walk, Martha's quilt (charity)
Bottom Row: Happier, Quite Contrary II, Sail Away II aka Matthew's quilt (gift), Emery's quilt (gift)

Not bad all things considered.

Ok I'll do the last Christmas entry and then I can move on to 2012 already!

Christmas Eve was at mum and dad's as usual. Because I'm an idiot and managed to lose a gift, we had to go via Westfield to replace it on the way to Hinchinbrook. So we stopped and got a Santa photo before we left:



Of course, I found the misplaced gift on Boxing Day in the nappy bag. Its ok though, it was gold class vouchers, so Elliot & I have an excuse to go to the movies now.

The spread at mums - note the truffle platters on the bottom, made by yours truly:



The kids got spoiled rotten - lots of books which is great. They got some wooden Thomas train stuff from mum and dad which has gone down incredibly well - Henry likes to push the trains around (and break the track), Oliver likes to load and unload the cargo etc.

The whole photo-set is here: Christmas Eve 2011

Christmas Day started late here, Henry was up at sparrow fart but had a feed and went back to sleep so I did too. I woke at 9.45am and realised we needed to be out the door by 10.20am so it was then rush, rush, rush. Oliver was thrilled with his squishy red dalek and the Octonauts characters and took it quite well when we read the letter out to him explaining that Santa had got him a Octopod but the naughty elves (ie Aus Post) forgot to pack it on the sleigh and Mrs Claus would have to post it from the North Pole.



We got out the door on time but then spent 3 freaking hours in traffic getting to Austinmer, missing lunch (again). Once we got there it was all good though, we had something to eat, the kids exchanged presents then because it was hot (and not raining!! Hooray!) the kids all stripped down to undies and we got the hose out and they gave Lewis' new Slip & Slide a go.



The whole photo-set is here: Christmas Day

(I have no frigging idea why these images are different sizes. None whatsoever. They were all run through Instagram and saved before being uploaded to my laptop, from there to my website. Clearly something has happened, god knows what, but I'm over trying to work it out already, you'll all just have to deal with it).

So this year I was NOT a bad parent, I did remember to organise the teacher gifts. It didn't twig last year that I was supposed to until I got to the Christmas concert and by then it was too late. In my defense, I did have a newborn last year - that's my excuse anyway.

This year I had 3 teachers at preschool who definitely needed gifts as they've been awesome to Oliver this year. He's loved every minute of preschool and learned heaps. Child care is a bit sketchy, they've done a good job looking after him but there's been a parade of staff this year, and almost everyone Oliver has bonded with has gone. There was only one teacher left who he really knows and who always makes a point to speak to us when we do drop off/pick up. So all up, 4 gifts were needed.

In the sewing group we all decided we'd have a crack at doing fabric-covered notebooks for teachers. There are about a thousand tutorials for them which are all pretty similar so just Google for one. I stupidly didn't read any instructions first and bought spiral-bound notebooks so they weren't perfect but they were still pretty cool I think. I also did red/white/green spiral cookies in little noodle boxes to go with them.





I ended up doing similar ones for Mum and Renee as part of their Christmas present, and Karah and Sean got a diary each. I have another diary sitting in the study for myself but I still haven't covered it yet.

Ok last one for now, I'll cover actual Christmas Eve & Day another time. I've got a child-free session planned, as soon as Henry goes down for a nap I'm off to Westfield for a pedicure and a spot of sale shopping, so I need to stop blogging and go have a shower.

Shock, horror, we actually did a Christmas card this year. I know I said I wasn't going to but Elliot talked me into it. I left it too late to organise it via Blue Dog so did my own using a free template I found on Ucreate (not Pinterest, I know!). They were expensive to print though, so we only did 20 of em to overseas people, grandparents and close friends. No offense intended if you didn't get one, we just figured most of you had FB and saw it there anyway! Next year I'll try to be more organised and get them printed earlier so they are cheaper to do.



Merry Christmas!!

Because I'm a slacker and haven't even started the cloth Advent calender I want to make for the kids two years running, I needed something else as a chocolate-free alternative. Omi does buy the kids chocolate Advent calenders so we do that too (I eat Henry's but I imagine that will change next Christmas) but we do that after dinner at night and I wanted something for mornings. I found this on Pinterest and it was perfect for Oliver.



We also did a gingerbread house together, though we cheated and used a kit from Kmart. The kit was awesome in terms of its kid-friendliness and low-frustration factor but the included icing was terrible, it never set properly. Next year I'll do the same kit but make my own royal icing. I'll also pipe the details (ie windows, shingles) first, THEN glue the sides and roof together, because trying to pipe windows on vertically sucks. Unfortunately for us, despite me wrapping it up in cling wrap, the ants got to it within a few days. Its all the rain, whenever its raining for more than a day the ants come into the house. Drives me nuts. Next year I'll invest in some clear cellophane and try to make it more ant-proof to get it to last until Christmas Day.



Lastly, here's a photo of our child-friendly Nativity set, or as Oliver calls it, the "Baby Jesus set." It rarely actually looked like this normally Hurricane Henry (or Godzilla, if you like) would tear through and knock it all over/scatter it around/make off with baby Jesus in his mouth. Which is fine, that's why I bought a wooden kiddy one rather than the stupidly expensive German wooden one I actually wanted.

So much for keeping up with the blogging hey. I'm hopeless. Here's the first of a couple of Christmas-theme posts.

I have this 'thing' where I can't do anything Christmassy before 1st December. This will be changing next year because not only have I failed for the second year running to make a fabric Advent calender, Oliver's Christmas present still hasn't turned up from the UK. Poor kid only wanted two things, an Octopod and a squishy red Dalek, and the Octopod didn't make it here in time. He got a letter from Santa explaining that the naughty elves (aka Australia Post, the useless bastards) forgot to pack it in Santa's sack but he will get Mrs Claus to post it when he gets back to the North Pole. He was disappointed but he didn't cry which made me very proud of him.

I did however manage to complete this before Christmas:



I'm very happy I got it done in time, I've been whinging about wanting a nice tree skirt for like 3 years. I'm also thrilled the binding worked, its the first time I've bound anything curved with homemade bias binding. The little trees are based on the Little Forrest Quilt I found on Pinterest.

Full view of Christmas Corner:



Christmas bunting (and tags, etc) I got online from Cupcake Wishes & Birthday Dreams - an FYI, to get stuff off Scribd without paying, join up using FB and look around, then wait. You'll get an email with 7 days free access. Then go in and get whatever you want before unsubscribing before the 7 days is up.

I did utterly fail to finish the wreath in time, its still in pieces in the study. So next year I'm going to start Christmas prep the minute Henry's birthday is past and hopefully actually get some stuff done. I'd do it now but I really can't face any more Christmas right now.

I'm a member of a group of ladies called The Sewing Sisterhood (link above). Mostly we just get together and discuss crafting, occasionally we do swaps of handmade items, we find hard-to-find fabrics for each other, and we help promote each other's online stores (though not all of us sell, some only craft for fun). A couple of times a year we also do an auction for charity. Earlier this year we had a soft doll action and I made this:



Which I wasn't completely happy with, but that was pattern fail mostly I think. She was such a fiddly pain in the rear I've sworn off doll making for life (though I reserve the right to change my mind on that when I've forgotten the pain of making it). I can't even remember now which charity it was in aid off, whoops. There was also recently an auction of pink items in aid of Breast Cancer but I didn't participate in that one.

The one that's been going on for a while is Martha the traveling dolly. Her full story is on the Sewing Sisterhood blog, but in short: A bunch of members (not me, because I wasn't paying attention and didn't realise until it was too late, whoops) sent fabric in for Martha's patchwork body, then she went on tour around the country to different members houses. She picked up some accessories with every stop. I added in a little dolly-sized quilt so she has somewhere to sleep at her new home:



The auction finished yesterday and she sold for $220, plus some of the bidders who lost out have also made donations. An excellent outcome IMO. There are more TSS charity projects in the pipeline and I'll no doubt be involved in some of them.