Thanks for the inspiration Amy!!

Recently, the lovely Amy posted this blog post about a gorgeous vintage fabric shop not terribly far from where I live. Isn't it always the way that visitors to your part of the world tend to see so much more of the great places around your home!!

Well, I realised that I would be spending the Australia Day long weekend extremely close to where this gorgeous shop is located and I made a point of heading over to visit. I wasn't disappointed!!

It was an absolute treasure trove of fabric goodness!! If you are in the neighbourhood, do yourself a favour and go visit! Jen is lovely and very accommodating! If you simply can't get there, the online shop and blog are worth visiting too!!

Now, on to other news ...... I know I have been rather absent from this space for a few weeks now and I have some excellent excuses:

• My kids have been on summer holidays which has meant much less "screen time" for me!!
• Any available screen time has been consumed by final tweakings of our new website. Will be launching extremely soon. Much rejoycing!!
• The dog ate my blog post!

Hoping to be much more present in the coming weeks and months.

Happy stitching!

Andi xx

A rather huge finish ... and a birthday boy!!

Many months ago I was on Craft Camp with my crafty besties and Lisa was doing a new craft ... needlepoint! This is a craft I have often thought of as very Nanna-ish but ...knowing what I know about quilting ... how it is perceived and how funky it can actually be .... I knew not to let my preconceptions spoil a perfectly good crafting opportunity.

Sure enough, Lisa was making a cushion cover with a very funky pop-art-ish image of a favourite comedian and it was going to be AWESOME!!

"I can do that", I thought. Next thing I was sending images to Lisa to pixelate for me (this was pre-YouPatch) and buying my supplies. I thought it would be an easy and quick project. I was so wrong!! It was indeed challenging .... and took a VERY long time. The background was particularly tedious as it was highly repetitive and BORING!!!

But I persisted and managed to finish in time for my Jake's 10th birthday. Here 'tis ...

46,656 stitches later ..... I'm very pleased with it but delighted that it is finished and I can focus on other crafts for a while.

In the meantime, happiest of birthdays to my ten-year-old, happy, smart, inquisitive, caring, delicious boy. We love you very much. xxxx

Happy stitchin'
Andi xx

Happy new year

Wishing you a happy and healthy year ahead.

A year of new adventures!

A year of great creativity!

A year of love, laughter and precious moments.

Andi xxx

Photo-realism with YouPatch

Thanks to the lovely Abbe for the feedback about YouPatch. Ab runs a fabulous craft retreat in Woodend, Australia and had this to say after discussing YouPatch with some friends at the retreat recently.

Very cool idea but [we are] not into Marilyn or the pop art look. We are all intrigued with the product but thought maybe demonstrating with an actual photograph or something with the more detailed pixelating might be better. The Groucho and Marilyn pics are somewhat similar.

To be honest, I think I had gotten carried away with the pop-art look because I love it so much and had therefore neglected other types of images.

So, in response to Abbe's feedback, here are some more photorealistic pixelated images generated with the YouPatch software.

Quilters do love their cats!

And dogs!!

Landmarks are very do-able.

Amy Farrah Fowler: My favorite 'Big Bang Theory' character

The King

The 11th Doctor with that trademark bowtie

It is worth noting that these images often work best at the highest resolution with a large number of colors. This makes for a more complex quilt pattern but still absolutely 'do-able' using the very quilter-friendly YouPatch patterns. However, some images (like the doggy, above) can still be pixelated beautifully at a lower resolution.

With such a new product / service, feedback like Abbe's is invaluable for us and we invite anyone with advice/suggestions to contact me at info@youpatch.com. We are constantly aiming to improve what we have to offer at YouPatch (due to launch in the New Year) and can only do this if you let us know what you think!!

So, what do you think? Which 'Doctor' would you pixelate?

Andi xx

Merriest of merries!

Wishing you all a very merry christmas (for those that celebrate) and a day of peace, relaxation, good company and great food.

Love from Andi xx

A YouPatch pixel quilt finish!

I have finally finished up the Marilyn quilt.

I'm so pleased with how she has worked out.

The quilting is quite dense with matching color thread for each color in the quilt top.

As you can see in the photo above, I initially quilted this quilt without a border. Once it was all quilted and trimmed, I decided that a black frame (thicker than just a black binding) would frame it up nicely in the space we have to hang it.

I had the dilemma of adding borders to an already quilted top. But then I found this tutorial which is a brilliant way of adding quilted borders in a QAYG style. It was very easy to do and a brilliantly written tutorial!! Thanks Marianne :-)

Now I have a question for all of you ...

What would be your approach to quilting one of these pixel quilts? Would you hand quilt? Machine quilt? Straight line? Free motion? What quilting designs would you consider?

Andi xx

PS Don't forget you can get your own free Marilyn pixel quilt pattern over at youpatch.com :-)