I’m sure most crafty Aussies are familiar with The Mirabel Foundation through Meet Me At Mike’s annual softie drive, a wonderful Melbourne based charity doing amazing work with children who have had a rough start to life.
Mirabel assists children who have been orphaned or abandoned due to parental illicit drug use and are now in the care of extended family (kinship care). Mirabel believes that every child deserves a childhood and its mission is to break the destructive cycle of addiction and disadvantage.
One of my favourite crafty mamas, Jhoanna Monte Aranez of One Red Robin is running the 5km event in Run Melbourne, an impressive feat considering she has admitted that she is certainly no runner 
Jho is inching her way closer to her goal of $1000 for the foundation every day, but with only one day to go and another couple of hundred to raise to hit her target things are getting a little close! So if you have a few bucks spare to donate to a good cause, please head over to the EveryDay Heroes website and donate to support Jhoanna and The Mirabel Foundation via their secure website.
You can also support Jho and keep up with her training via her Twitter account, @oneredrobin.
Thank you 
Posted in Events.
Remember before I started jet-setting around NSW I promised a post from one of my favourite crafty bloggers, Ethan? Well the wait is finally over, a good week later than when I meant to get it up, but my thanks to Ethan for being so patient. Please say hello, check out his blog and give a warm welcome to Ethan on his first guest post at CraftBlog.
Today I will be sharing a quick tutorial of how I fold my fabric - so you can organise all of your fabric for spring. The tutorial is for any type material, as long as it is quite small (a cut of about 1½ metres maximum). The finished product is about the size of a fat quarter (15cm square). However, the sizes will vary slightly because of the fabric width, cut and weight of fabric etc. If you have any questions, feel free to pop over to my blog and contact me there!
Well, my fabric stash ‘box’ has been overflowing with fabric that I had bought and just stashed in there (literally - my fabric stash). I then decided to start a new project and had no-where to put my fabrics. Anyway, after buying the fabric I was thinking of a way to fold it so it could fit into the box with all the other fat quarters I had bought. It doesn’t take long; but I am a perfectionist, so it takes me about 5-7 minutes each one.
Let’s start shall we?
TIME REQUIRED: About 2-4 minutes for one type of fabric
DIFFICULTY: Really Easy!
Sorry about the quality of the photos - it’s been raining a lot lately - I tried to fix them in Photoshop for you!
You will need:
- Iron
- Ironing Board
- Fabrics
- Measuring Tape
- Starch (optional)
Full photo tutorial behind the jump –>
Continued…
Posted in Sewing, Tutorials.
Tagged with fat quaters, folding fabric, organisation.
I’m off, with kids in tow, for a week of fun and games with two of my sisters, my brothers in law, niece and feotul nephew.
I shall leave you in the capable hands of my husband, chief of moderating comments and answering any emails that come in, and Ethan Watters will also be making a guest post just to keep the fires burning.
When I return I’m hoping my wonderfully crafty sisters will have pumped by brain full of ideas that I can share with you!
Posted in Site News.
I just completed some Easter cards to hand out to my family this weekend and thought I’d share them here
The zip folder contains all of the images shown above. Three that you can cut out and stick onto the front of a blank greeting card, and three to print out onto cardstock and fold to create your own 4 x 6 inch cards.
Click here to download the zip file.
Please print out the cards to share with your friends and family, but please do not use the cards or the designs for any commercial purposes. Thank you!
Posted in Digital Arts, Personal Crafts.
One of my favourite quotes is from Scott Adams, one that I very much live my personal and crafting life by, and even feel it’s important enough to have on my facebook page 
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
CraftFail.com embraces the ones you probably shouldn’t keep. The blog is still young but already features Spam Soap, cornucopias gone wrong and a neckline that belongs in a cartoon. Unlike some blogs out there which revel trawling through etsy and then publicly mocking other peoples handiwork behind their back (I will save my thoughts on that for another long ranty post!), CF.com mocks their own failures and shows us that no matter how well intentioned something is, we can still accept that it can sometimes not turn out as wonderfully as we envisioned.
Check out CraftFail.com, and also the creator’s primary blog, DollarStoreCraft.com.
Every week I try to chase away those midweek blues by showcasing some of my favourite craft bloggers. If you would like your blog to be considered for the “Wednesday Blog Love” post, or have a blog you’d like to recommend, please contact me.
Posted in Online Finds, Wednesday Blog Love.
You know, I bashed about some other titles for this post, along the lines of “gone cold on ideas for fabric”, lots of chilly references and at one point even a bear pun, but they just didn’t work, I fear I’m losing my knack!
A couple of days ago my neighbour popped around and threw some fabric into my hand and asked me if I could come up for some ideas for it. Half a yard of large scale novelty polar bear print quilting weight cotton from VIP Cranston. She commissioned a shower curtain for their old house out of it and the half a yard was what was left over. Her friend who made the shower curtain gave it back to her thinking that she could do something with it and instead it’s been sitting in her home for three years taunting her.
Now it’s sitting in my home taunting me instead. I am flat out stumped. To me the print is too large and the yardage is too small for me to think what to do with it, the best I could come up with are some drawstring laundry bags but that’s not exactly exciting. So instead I am turning to you dear CB readers. What kind of things could I suggest to turn this piece of fabric into? Valerie (my neighbour) has a new polar bear-less bathroom so it doesn’t have to be kept in there. She also has two sons at 2.5 and 1 year old and they’re always keen on something new. She is at a novice sewing level, but I’m more than willing to help her out with anything more complicated and she has access to all the bits and pieces in my sewing room so not much is out of the realms of possibility.
So let your imagination run wild and tell me what you would do with it. I couldn’t bear to let it go to waste.
Posted in CB Help.
Tagged with help, polar bears, Sewing.
