Crafting for a good cause!

The lovely people over at StitchBird Fabrics are carrying out an online auction for some beautiful quilting fabric to raise money for the Mary Potter Hospice.

“I am offering for auction a Heather Ross Far Far Away Quilt Combo Pack and the proceeds of the auction will be donated to Mary Potter Hospice.  To bid in the auction all you need to do is leave a comment on this post with your bid (please ensure I have your email address should you win).  At 12 noon on Saturday 19 June (the end of Fabric a Brac) the person with the highest bid will win the auction.  The bids will be in New Zealand dollars and I will pay the cost of the postage of the fabric to the auction winner.”

So head on over and take a peek!

http://stitchbird.blogspot.com/2010/06/auction-for-mary-potter-hospice-and.html

Make Do & Mend –

No recipe or pattern this time folks just some old fashioned contemplation! Recipes coming soon though 🙂

Awhile ago I ordered this book:

Make Do & Mend: Keeping your family and home afloat on war rations.

An interesting concept, I hadn’t really ever considered the impact of the war past the tragedy and obvious military themes but actually the huge rerouting of much of the industrial capacity meant that households went without a surplus of many things, clothing, fabric, energy, food, any waste of these things was considered abhorrent as that wastage could have gone towards the “war effort”. The book is a cute wee thing with a collection of war time brochures and posters broadcasting how to live with less, a rather relevant topic I thought!

With the current debacle going on in this country about mining national parks it has been hard to escape the thoughts that even though I oppose mining, I still consume large quantities of resources pulled from the ground in someone elses country!

Nanatech is about many things, it’s about having fun, celebrating and remembering the past, it’s about bringing back essential skills that might be starting to slip from our lives but also it’s about living more lightly and with less, there are some great skills that allow things like clothes to be mended and remade to make them better than ever before without having to buy new ones, saving money and resources, a win win!

I’ll leave you with some light living tips from the wartime!

From “The Battle for Fuel”

*Never light your oven to cook a single dish. With a little planning you can easily prepare an entire meal while the oven is hot, as well as a pudding or tart that can be eaten cold the next day.

*Use a small bowl for washing up, heat the water on the oven while it is hot and do the whole days dishes at once

From “The Board of Trade: Every Woman is her own Clothes Doctor”

* To legnthen a dress, let in a band of contrasting colour material of the same fabric weight from the waist to 6 IN below and bind the kneckline and hem in same contrasting colour.

Because I needed another hobby….

not!!!

Like my mother, I too have recently taken up quilting, actually it’s all her fault, and by her fault I mean she was really generous and bought me a jellie roll of fabric! I know a jellie roll? Wierd aye, my weird craft terms get lots of funny looks because I forget other people don’t know what a jellie roll is!!

SO a jellie roll is this:

(a bazillion little bits of fabric all rolled up really nicely, and i say do no i repeat do no unroll it until you have to, this will create a mess, I would know, and that is why you get a lovely commercial picture of a jellie roll, not a picture of mine :D)

Yeah, I’m planning on making this quilt….

or maybe I should start with this one….

I think I’ll go for the second option! The pattern seems easy enough, I’ll post a link to it on the “patterns” page too, so if anyone else wants to give quilting ago you can have a peak!

I will keep everyone up to date with how this project goes, I cannot ensure there will be success, only laughter as I attempt to yet again learn yet another craft in my attempt to cram as much crafteyness into my head before age twenty!

Stitching and Bitching

Stitch & Bitch (phrase): Used since WWII to refer to social knitting groups in which there is much crafting, gossiping, drinking of tea and consumption of baked goods.

Nanatech is having it’s inagural stitch n’ bitch in Wellington this week! We are introducing these nights as a way for crafters (not just knitters!) to get together and have a yarn (okay sorry that was a bad and forseeable pun).

If you don’t have a craft you are also more than welcome and if you would like to learn a craft please come along and share what you’d like to learn and we’ll see what we can do about finding someone to teach you.

We will have on hand a variety of crafty things including a couple of sewing machines and a spinning wheel.

The whole aim is to have fun, craft and talk about whatever we feel like! We’d love to see you there! And if you’d like, bring a plate of something yum to snack on! Details found here:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=361563583606&ref=mf