Bunks’ Blog

Just a quick blog to show off my new giftie that I received in the mail yesterday from Catherine. It came all the way from Australia here to me in Canada. Catherine is a most wonderful blogger who does the most amazing work and she had a free give away to celebrate her 700th (I think 700th) post and I was one of two winners, yeah me! Her blog is Calidore and can be found in the blogroll at the side of this blog.

Anyhow here is a picture of the organizer.

Outside of organizer, velcroed shut.

Inside of organizer with space for a little notebook and small sectioned off pockets that can hold pens, pencils, crochet hooks, small scissors, etc.

I love how the outside apples are echoed by the apple fabric prints on the inside. Catherine was kind enough to put some brochures in the organizer so I could read all about the area in which she lives, a very clever idea that I’ll have to remember next time I have a give away. All in all a fantastic gift, thanks Catherine so much.

Karen

Not much happening around here in the way of new creativity. After finishing up the towels for the shower gifts for my daughter’s upcoming wedding I started in working on the rest of the beaded scarves for the bridesmaids. I almost managed to finished one whole side yesterday of one scarf so that leaves me with 4.5 scarves left to go. Needless to say this is going to take a bit so I probably won’t have much posted in the next couple of weeks. I felt such an incredible relief to get the oven towels done that I’m determined to finish off the scarves so I can then concentrate on other stuff that needs doing.

I may have to start with the list-making idea to be more productive. Half the time I feel like the proverbial chicken running around with it’s head chopped off and I look back at my day and think where did all the time go and what did I do? The thing is I know when I’m wasting time but there are days when I don’t feel like I have yet…kaboom…the day is done.

Anyhow for lack of anything better to post visually, here are some pictures of the latest shipment of fabrics I ordered. I’m done with ordering material for a long while now. I was pleased with the blues I ordered and for the most part not as pleased with the rest of the colours. I sort of went haphazard with some of the choices with the result that I didn’t like some of them unlike the first shipment. I hate to say it but I truly am a boring, small calico print type of girl; conservative I guess. (Except when it comes to tie-dye) I won’t bother posting a picture of the beading I’m doing as I have already posted a picture before.

Blue prints

Assorted coloured prints.

Karen

Just a quick blog as I’ve spent most of the day away and busy. Here is the picture of the turquoise and lemon yellow tank that I dyed up yesterday. Lol you can see me from a mile away in this top, nice and bright for sure. Kinda pleased with the colour combo even if I do stand out like a whale in it.

Turquoise - Lemon yellow tank dyed with Dharma dyes.

Karen

I have a baby shower to go to at the church tonight so I decided once again to tie-dye more baby items and a t-shirt for the mom. I already had a left-over rainbow tee from the garage sale so only had to do a few baby things.

Baby onsies and toddler T-shirts and socks.

Rainbow adult shirt.

Last time I dyed up some baby stuff I choose too small a size so this time I did 18 month onsies and size 2-3T for the shirts and socks. I dyed up more than I needed so I’ll have some more for the next time. The turquoise batched out really well so since I have some left over I’m going to dye up another tank top for myself using the turquoise and some lemon yellow. Hopefully it’ll look decent on me and I won’t look to huge in it. I’ll post a picture when I do the wash-out.

Karen

Well I finally finished all of the towels for the shower in August. I ended up crocheting 28 towels and giving away two for the oven towels tutorial so I have 26 left for little thank you gifts for the wedding shower guests.

Oven towels for wedding shower.

I took a photo of the poppies so that people could see the after picture. My flowers have turned out nice this year but there is always the problem of trying to stake them so they don’t fall over. I haven’t figured out how to do that with the poppies, oh well.

Poppies, one of three beds.

I received the swirl swap in the mail that we did last month. I did this same swap last year as well so I now have enough squares to make a quilt but I’ll hold off on that until after I finish beading the scarves for the bridesmaids but I thought I’d post a picture so people could see the different colours.

Swirl swap 2008

And finally I’m posting a picture of the material I received from “Thousands of Bolts”. I had placed a small order a few weeks ago and was pleased with the quality of the fabric so decided to order more. Well because I live in Canada and the online store is based in the states shipping costs are always a factor so it was cheaper per metre to order 30 yards instead of six at a time so yes I ordered 30 yards. Needless to say I was so pleased I ordered another 30 and I’m waiting for them to show up in the next couple of days, then I can probably safely say I’ll call it quits for quite a while until I use up some of the fabric.

30 yards of assorted colours from Thousands of Bolts (well not actually I seem to have chopped off a few yards when I took the picture).

The fabric on average is around $3.85/4.15 yard for cottons and around $5.95 yard for batiks. With the taxes and shipping it works out to less than $6.00 yard which is far cheaper than what I’d pay here at the fabric or quilt store; it’s even cheaper than Walmart, which by the way is closing down the fabric department in their stores in our area.

I’ve checked around the Internet and these are pretty good prices. I wouldn’t be ordering the fabric otherwise. Some of the fancy name brand fabrics go for around $9.95 yard and thats a bit to rich for my blood. The quilt would have to be pretty special for me to out-lay that kind of money especially for buying fabric over the Internet rather than in person. I’m not even sure I could get the same prices if I crossed the border and bought at JoAnn’s so I’m happy.

Karen

Well the weather for May was unseasonably cool but it didn’t bother me because I’m not very partial to heat but today we got socked with temperatures up in the high eighties. I’m not too sure what the high was because I stopped looking at 10:30 a.m. when it was about 86 degrees Fahrenheit (yes I’m old school it should be in Celsius).

Anyhow I rushed down to take some pictures of the poppies in the garden because with the heat I’m sure they will be blooming soon. The couple of iris buds that were closed yesterday where open today and and I do have one red poppy showing. It should be a real treat in the next couple of days when they all pop open and I wanted to have a record of it.

Along with the flowers starting to bloom the weeds have come back with a vengence. It took about 3-4 weeks of work on the gardens to get them dug and weeded but you wouldn’t know it. The thistles have really deep roots and they’ve all come back including some in the raised bed that got put in. John sprayed them with round-up today, well most of them so I’ll leave them alone for a couple of days then dig them out. There doesn’t seem much point in digging out the weeds to turn around in three weeks and do it again. We’ll see if this works.

I got carried away taking pictures so here are a few.

One of the poppy beds in the back garden.

Poppy.

Star Columbine.

Purple Iris.

Raised Bed with a sorry assortment of veggies.

Some strawberries in second raised bed.

The dreaded thistles.

Pampas grass, it never seems to do well and always takes forever to come up after winter. Two miserly blades.

Cosmos, there must be a dwarf variety because these don’t seem to grow over a foot tall.

Forget-me-nots. These were growing outside the garden border as weeds. They will take over the garden if you let them and despite ripping them all out they’ve managed to find a spot to grow.

Columbine the usual variety.

Bleeding Heart.

I forget the name of this one, just that I bought it for shade.

I have other plants growing but I’ll save those for a rainy day?

Karen

My husband and I bought a couple of rainbarrels for the gardens and the lawns in an attempt to conserve water. It was a challenge to try and divert the water from the upper downspout in a way that we could collect the water but also have the overflow continue along its previous path.

The water seems to just dribble but I’m glad to say that we got at least one barrel of water from this last rainfall maybe two if it keeps raining. Here’s a couple pictures of my newest additions to the family.

Rainbarrel #1 - Recycled industrial food grade barrels, olives I think.

Rainbarrel #2

I also got some goodies in the mail. Yesterday I received the material I ordered from “Thousands of Bolts” They can fit six yards of fabric into a priority envelope which costs me $9.95 to send to Canada so thats what I ordered and they sent a bonus fat quarter which was a pleasant surprise.

I choose fabrics from the creams/tans/ecru section.

Today I got the polyester colour twist thread from ThreadArt. I’m not sure how this will sew up, hopefully it’s good quality thread. The price was right at 12 spools for $19.95 and I also ordered a couple of their namebrand rotary cutters, which were a good price at $2.49 each.

Polyester colour twist thread. The thread is composed of two colours.

Rotary blades, one is a pinking blade and the other a wave blade.

Lastly a picture of the flowers sent to John’s dad’s funeral on Monday from his fellow staff members in Performance Engineering at Darlington.

Gordon Waldie 1917 - 2008. RIP dad you were loved and cherished by all.

Karen

I’ve been tagged again and so in the spirit of the game I’ll list six unimportant things about myself but since most of the people I know have been tagged I won’t bother tagging anyone else (sorry if this isn’t part of it).

1. I’m a sweet freak, love my chocolate, cookies, icecream etc, etc.

2. I’m a horder to a degree. I love buying fabric, yarn and craft goodies that someday I may make into something, I do use some of the stuff (honest).

3. I listen to Triple M Sydney radio through the Internet even though I live in Ontario, Canada. I love the music mix they have and their music appeals to me more than the North American stuff. LOL, I can sing along to all the commercials.

4. I’m mostly a homebody. Travelling is great but I like being at home. My husband loves the cruises we’ve been on so probably more of those are in our future.

5. I have a cat named Nicky who is an orange and white tabby. He’s about 15 years old and although he looks to be in great shape the poor old guy doesn’t move like he used to. I look at him and see myself as I hobble around with my stiff back, we’re both getting older.

6. I have a fantastic husband whom I love very much (along with four grown kids). He’s very…well I was going to list all the great things about him but it’d probably be to mushy and sentimental and take up a lot of space (as if this sentence isn’t) so I’ll leave it at that.

Karen

Okay, I posted the dyed shirts the other day but not how they looked finished so here are the finished results…ta dah!

Mandala Tapistry- there are several ways to tie a mandala, this one is from Tom and Martine’s DVD series “Tie Dye 101″ and “Advanced Tie Dye Techniques”. I used the same colour-way as they did (well not the exact same colours but the same colour families) and realised afterwards that I’d done a shirt in these colours, oh well next time I’ll try something different.

Multi-coloured Vee

Multi-coloured Vee, these shirts were also from the above DVD series.

Rainbow center spiral

Off-center spiral, colour-way idea from the above DVD but using a red I personally created from one of my fabric swaps…I’m so proud

Center spiral stained glass shirt using the left-over dye from my last colour wheel

Spider spiral, have to admit that afterwards I realised that maybe I should have reversed the red and black so I’d have a black spider instead of a red one, oh well.

Rubber band resist with the left-over colour wheel dyes only a full yard piece.

Heart shirt

Off-center spiral

After an exhausting two days of work I’ve grown tired of tie-dyes once again. I will never do this for a business as it’s simply not work the effort for me. Aside from which people where I live will simply not buy tie-dye. I guess we are ultra conservative or what not. I sold one of the above shirts to a young girl that is a fan. The rest will have to do for gifts or I’ll save them for the next church function and maybe hope to sell another…one by one…, lol.

Karen

I’ve been busy the last couple of days trying to get some shirts ready for our church garage sale tomorrow. The only problem is I was so busy with the garden these past couple of weeks I didn’t start early enough. I’ve got a few done but haven’t washed them out yet. Could be a problem as the sale starts tomorrow at 8:00 am and I have a very strong feeling I “won’t” be up washing shirts at six in the morning. Oh well, we’ll see how many get done.

Meanwhile some pictures of tied and dyed shirts so people can play a guessing game as to what they really look like.

Tie dye #1

Tie dye #2

Tie dye #3

Tie dye #4

Tie dye #5

Tie dye #6

Tie dye #7

In case you’re thinking that some of the above pictures look the same you’re right but the items are all different. I’ve posted all of the dyed items I did below.

Dyed item #1

Dyed item #2

Dyed item #3

Dyed item #4

Dyed item #5

Dyed item #6

Dyed item #7

Dyed items #8, #9, #10

Here’s to hoping the washout is a success and everything turns out. I’ll post pictures tomorrow of the laundered items.

Karen