My Crazy Craft Obsession

I have always wanted to be good at one craft thing.  My first blog was about knitting - which is one of the crafts that my mother is absolutely fantastic at - alas (Update!) I have to tell you my knitting adventure was a complete failure.  Thankfully my lovely mum is almost finished the scarf for Justin so he at least HAS one!

So I'm moving onto sewing and felt craft!  For as long as I can remember I've looked with utter confusion at the piles of fabrics; with complete wonder at clothes/toys/furnishings made by this contraption called a sewing machine.  Last Saturday I bit the bullet, stole my mum's sewing machine and hit the fabric stores/bookstores/craft blogs - here are the results!

My modest little fabric pile - augh I could have bought so much more!  Poor store assistants, I sucked them dry for information on the differences between the fabrics - but hell I spent enough!  The top three are all 100% cotton, I'm hoping to make a little quilt from the yellow ones and maybe a skirt from the red stripy one.   The pink fabric is for a secret project, so shhh.  I also got a teal one and a grey stretch blend to make dress pants.

My not-so-modest felt pile.  These are mixture of different felt materials.. I seem to have this love for the material, probably stemming back to making little toys with it when I was in primary school :3  It's so cheap and versatile; I'm particularly interested in making felt appliques to go onto things.  I'm already pretty handy with hand-sewing it's just the sewing machine I have to master!

I <3 Buttons so so so much!  I had to buy these cute mix packs, more buttons then you can poke a stick at!  Here we also see half of the pretty thread colours I bought to make my fabrics.

Finally, this is the book I bought from Borders.  It was fairly exxy @ $55 but it's one hell of a chunky book!  It goes into a lot of detail about different sewing techniques and is a really great starting point for a nubcake like me.  But in saying that there isn't much in it for exciting 'projects' which is why I want another half a dozen books already haha.

Books - Open: Andre Agassi's Biography

I started reading this book a few weeks ago before we left for Hamilton Island.  My Justin is a big tennis fan, before I met him I didn't even understand how the game worked let alone who the main players were.  So when he urged me to read the biography, I didn't honestly think I'd enjoy it very much.  Now that I've finished it, I can't tell you that I like tennis more than when I began, but I did enjoy it for what it was - another person's life.   It was particularly interesting because of Agassi's confession of hating the game that brought him so much fame, success and even love with his wife of 9 years, Steffi Graf.

He was the american saviour of tennis in his heyday.  The chicks loved him and the guys wanted to be him.  I can't believe he seriously got around with a mullet back in the day but there's the 90's for you I guess.  Most of all it's crazy how important this signature look was to him, since it wasn't even his own natural hair!  I think the best thing he got out of his relationship with Brooke Shields was her suggestion to shave that atrocity off and get rid of the guise.  Which of course brings me to my next point about the book - the Nikon ad that allowed the press to slaughter his character because of one catch phrase not even created by Agassi but written into a script by the company - 'Image is Everything'.  Watch the ad here.

I also found this interview by 60 minutes in America interesting, he seems to me to be a very genuine and likeable person.  I think most people can relate to not being happy with what we've got in life, I don't think that just because someone is rich that it doesn't give them the right to lament their lack of choice in life.  I also like that Agassi has given back a lot, reading about his education foundation and prep school was really interesting, given his lack of being able to have a proper education.

Books - Love Our Way

So I've been doing lots of research for an assignment about adopting from overseas, which led me to a really great book written by a mother in Canberra that adopted 6 children from overseas.  It's called 'Love Our Way' and it's by Julia Rollings.  She adopted a baby from Korea, then another baby with a condition that made him blind, then a older pair of brothers from India that were abandoned by their father and their last adoption was a brother and sister from India.  It is these last two children Akil and Sabila, that are the chunk of the story because they were actually taken by their father and sold illegally, which meant that their mother never knew what happened to them.

Anyway it is a fantastic read - it really opens your eyes to how many children out there are in need of a family.  I've always thought about perhaps adopting at a later stage and reading this really helped me to understand some of the responsibilities and hard work that comes with the decision to adopt.  It was also a really heartwarming read and I found it equally intriguing and helpful for my current assignment.  Julia Rollings also has a blog that talks a bit about the events after the book which can be found here.