Playing Poohsticks - a textured page

I've finally finished this scrapbook page which I started sometime last year.  I created the textured background using some die cut card and moulding paste and then coloured it with watercolours. I did a whole batch of backgrounds like this and then I have been slowly working back through them.

I used one of my Cocoa Daisy kits to finish the page, including these woodgrain alphabet Thickers (perfect for a page about playing in the woods).

The kit included the twine, sequins, woodgrain notecard and wooden veneer "page". The packet of embellishments in the kit was sealed with a tiny bit of woodgrain washi tape and I think it looks great on the top right edge of the photo.

A Sizzix rainbow chevron quilt

I have been using my Sizzix Big Shot again to help me make a quilt and I absolutely love this one. I made it for a raffle at church as we are having a day for "Dress A Girl Around the World" ( a great charity helping to clothe some of the poorest children in the world) and so we wanted to raise money to buy fabric, elastic and bias binding. The great news is that we raised £165 through the quilt raffle. The quilt was so eye-catching that lots of people wanted to win it and , to be honest, I was a little sad to see it go (but I could always make another one!)

I found this tutorial for a chevron quilt which looks great. It uses strip piecing which would make this quilt even quicker to put together. However, my cutting out is always terrible (I even managed to make a wobbly Log Cabin square once) and so I put my quilt together using a Sizzix rectangle die (2" x 4" finished size). I found that 1 fat quarter can be cut into 24 rectangles but some of my fabric pieces were a little smaller than a fat quarter so my quilt is 22 rectangles wide. 

I started with a stack of rectangles and sewed 11 lilac rectangles to 11 red rectangles. Then I sewed the remaining 11 red rectangles to 11 yellow rectangles in pairs and continued like this through the stack of fabrics. I laid out the fabric pairs on the floor to create the chevron pattern like this.

Each diagonal row is then sewn together and looks like this.

Then the rows are sewn together like this.

Eventually the quilt top looks like this - so pretty!

I finished the quilt by quilting in the ditch along the zig zag rows which was really effective and used a turquoise fabric to bind the edges.

One of the problems I had with the original tutorial was that it didn't give the finished dimensions for the quilt. Then ,after I gave the quilt away, I realised I hadn't measured mine either! This quilt has 22 rectangles across the quilt and there are 23 rows. I think the finished quilt measured approximately 40" x 50".

Scrapbooking an Imaginary friend

My little boy has an imaginary friend. Yesterday I asked him to count how many people were in our family. He answered "1...2...3...4...5.......and my friend astronaut,6". As "My friend Astronaut" seems to be part of our family it is only right that he makes an appearance in a scrapbook! 

The boy has a great imagination and tells lots of stories about adventures he has with his friend Astronaut (who is also 4 I have been told), but his drawing skills aren't quite up to recording what Astronaut looks like. Luckily we had a big sister handy who could document him for me.

I finished off the page with various space themed stickers and rub-ons I had handy in my craft stash.

I am very happy that the astronaut has made his scrapbook debut.