Book Review: This Is What Happened by Mick Herron

This book was awesome. Yup I led with that. If you like crime thrillers then you must read this.

Maggie Barnes leads a life that not many would notice. No ties to anyone, deadbeat job, keeps to herself. Which makes her perfect to be recruited for a spy job - which goes wrong and leads to her being a safe house for two years.
There are so many twists in this book, not too many, enough that leaves you thinking - hold on-what? Not everything is as it seems but I can't say much more without giving the plot away. It is also not a spy-book as the blurb indicates - it is a psychological suspense that involves some very interesting but flawed characters.

Thanks to Hachette for the review copy of this book.

Fox(ish) Quilt

To start my crafty 2018 off, I decided to challenge myself. I have an amazing friend that I have known since primary school and she is having a baby pretty soon! I wasn't able to fly up for her baby shower so I decided to make something to send up.

They have not found out baby's gender so I decided to look through my fabric stash for inspiration. I had a bunch of orange/yellow/grey fabrics and a teeny scrap of fox fabric left so I squeezed three triangles out of that and made the other fabrics work around them. I wanted a relatively simple design so I went with rows of half-square triangles (it's a thing!), separated by some solid grey.

Once I had pieced together the quilt top I used a woolen blanket as batting and went to work with the quilting. This is the part I struggle with which is why in the past I have only done simple stitch-in-the-ditch quilting. I have issues with the back piece puckering and I get super frustrated hauling a huge and heavy quilt around my machine. However, I have been inspired by my friend Holly and her queen-sized quilt and I followed her lead and quilted random patterns on each triangle. I didn't really have any plan, which you can probably tell, but I challenged myself and I enjoyed doing it.

After I finished quilting each triangle I trimmed it to shape and added the binding. I handstitched it because it looks neater and I have a terrible track record of not catching the binding when I try to machine stitch it. 

I love the way this quilt turned out and I think that more will be on the horizon. I hope this quilt will keep bubba warm once it arrives. I love giving baby gifts!

You can check out some of my previous quilt attempts below:

Rainbow Chevron Quilt

Windmill Quilt

Vintage Sheet Quilt

Triangle Cot Quilt

Grey Stripe Quilt

Cross Quilt

Vintage Sheet Quilt #2

2017 Makings

I though that I would flick through my camera roll to see how many of the things I made have been documented this year. Turns out there were quite a few. Here they are:

Size 1 Bunny coat

Size 3 Bear coat

Size 3 Bear vest

Size 3 tiger dress-up coat

Size 2 unicorn vest

3-6 month size baby vest

Mother and daughter coordinating unicorn jackets

The lining of the mother/daughter jackets

Size 3 vest

Size 2 Dinosaur coat

Size 3 pony coat

5x 0-3 month baby vests

6-9 month size baby coat

Size 4 Dino vest

Yellow floral dress for me

Crochet giraffe for my nephew

Door mat

Door mat #2

Tree stump cake for my nephew

Pirate ship cake for Addison

Custom crochet baby blanket

Fox hot water bottle cover

Cat pot plant holder out of a Coke bottle

5x sets of tiny wooden villages

Bird string art

I'm glad that I managed to document these projects, I have definitely kept busy although I found that the first half of the year held a bit of a creative slump for me. I think I jumped from crochet to sewing because I needed some quick projects and that helped kick start my creativity again.

2018 will be another creative year for me, I have plenty of ideas in my head, I just need to find the time to do them. May this year be creative and fun for you too! xx