Repurposed Thursday.

I thought it might be fun to join in Re-purposed Thursday hosted by Fee. 

This is my Scissor Tree.  (sorry to say it is not easy to take a good pic of - in real life it looks better than this, and is very useful).  In its former life it was a tea light candle holder, with little lanterns hanging off the hooks.  I decided to make use of it for my scissors when my collection outgrew the mug stand I had used previously.

Oh dear, that does look a jumble.  But at least I can easily find my scissors, and truly it doesnt look that bad.


The little pots around the bottom were spice canisters, but fit perfectly around the base of the scissor tree, and hold rotary cutters, pencils, etc.

This pair of tailor's shears are one of my treasures.  They belonged to my Grandmother. Before she was married, she worked with her Father as a tailoress.  (He was a tailor in Broken Hill at the time).  My father had them for many years, and I must say they were used and abused over that time.  I claimed them after he died, and had them cleaned and sharpened.  In spite of their long and arduous life, they now cut beautifully.  That is definitely a testament to the quality of them.  The scissors would have to be between 90 and 100 years old.

My treasure indeed.  And they have been re-purposed back to their original purpose.

Purchases and spool collection

My visit  to the Home Patch store in Bathurst was a highlight of our trip to Orange.  I was tempted to buy more, but with limited time came small purchases.

The coloured buttons in the front are to give to my home quilting group friends.  They are so beautiful - and I couldnt resist buying them.   One piece of fabric is for a project coming up, and the others are "just because" ones.

 I found the spools there as I was leaving, so they had to come with me to add to my small but growing collection of old or interesting spools and reels.

From Bathurst we then headed to Sydney and I was able to have a bit of time with our second youngest Grandson, Sammy.  We dont see him very often at this stage.

Such a cute little one.

Crazy times

Well, after the past 2 or 3 weeks of crazy rush around chasing my tail time I am back to normal (whatever that is).  We spent last week at Orange for the Australian Field Days.  The company had a site there, and it seems to have been very successful. 

We had to stay in Bathurst - late decisions mean that motels were already booked out in Orange.  But, we stayed in the Citigate Motel on Mount Panorama.  Wonderful time !!!

There it is - the Motel.  From our balcony we looked at the Armourall Bridge. 

 Of course if we are staying there we at least have to do a circuit of the racetrack, dont we.  How do they travel at the speeds they do ????

The view as you drive around is spectacular - who would want to go so fast that you miss it?  But then I guess after doing the number of laps they do, it would be all too familiar - and they do want to get to the finish line asap.

My task for the site display was to make some paperweights with the company logo.

Before we left Bathurst, I was fortunate enough to have a little time to visit The Home Patch, and was in awe of everything in the store.  Beautiful fabrics, beautiful gift items, beautiful stitcheries.   Everywhere I turned I saw something new. I could have spent hours there, but we were on our way to Sydney, and time was limited.  Hopefully I will be able to visit there again one day.  I did manage to buy a few things - fabric, buttons etc. -   which I still need to take a pic of, so will post it later.

Now we are back home I have heaps of catching up to do.  So I will be off to visit some blogs and see what everyone has been up to over this past 2 weeks.

New binder cover

On Monday our craft group got together to finish off our Binder Carry-all, using the beautiful binder cover pattern from Joypatch.  The dresden plates were made a few weeks ago, and now the binder is assembled, and is ready to be filled with my patterns for WIPs and my Want to do's.  I dont think it will take long to fill - like so many, my list is loooong.

The front cover.  The background is very light blue fusions fabric, though it looks kind of murky cream in this pic.

The spine with embroidery.  (I did mine on the machine, rather than the beautiful hand embroidery in Joy's pattern - sometimes I need to take the quicker way or it will take too long to complete.)

 Inside the front cover - I need to find 3 buttons to put on the pocket flaps.  I added the little piece of doctors flannel on there to hold  needles and pins.

The back cover.

After sewing on the dresden plates and doing the quilting I decided to go for a bigger binder - not thinking that the dresden plates would then be off centre. I can live with that.  We also found that our binders must have been slightly bigger than the one Joy used, and so we added a little extra to both length and width of our cover.  All of the binders look good - with a variety of colours and finishes.