I have added our furryfungi twitter (@furryfungi) to the sidebar, feel free to follow it!

I’ve been slowly plodding through projects over the last couple of weeks, despite suffering from a tummy bug that didn’t seem to want to go away.

On the sewing front I finished a quilt top (photo to be posted soon), and today I made a skirt!

The pattern is by an Australian Designer “Make It Perfect”, and is a very simple wrap around skirt.

The fabric is from Pop Garden by Heather Bailey. I did make one boo-boo, I wanted the big flower to be at the front of the skirt, not realizing how the skirt functioned I placed it on the back. But as it is a wrap-around it doesn’t seem to matter if I swivel the pretty pattern to the front.

I remembered that I hadn’t photographed, my other skirt that I made before Christmas. So I took photos of it as well.

The fabric and pattern are both by Amy Butler. The pattern is “Barcelona Skirt” and the fabric is from her new range Daisy Chain.

I also have a knitting update as I have finished my sweater, but it will have to wait as I have to go to work!

-Stacey

Our garden is still alive!  Our seedlings are even surviving their transplants into their permanent homes.  

Since we both have a serious history of the deadly black thumb, we are using our container garden as a test;  If we pass we can move on to  starting our ‘real’ vegetable garden…  We are getting quotes to have 2 trees removed (horrible, horrible chinese elms), which will let our yard actually get some sun.  Our end goal is to successfully grow as much of the vegetables we eat as possible.

Our zucchini and cucumbers are powering along, our snow peas, beans, tomatoes (they finally germinated!), lettuces (ok we ended up buying seedlings of lettuce), silverbeet and herbs have all been transplanted out from our ’seedling nursery’.

The cats supervised while I planted out 3 different pots of cat grass and another of catnip to go into rotation- they will eat the cat grass to the roots so we have to rotate the pots around regularly.

More deliciously, we made chocolate pudding over the weekend.  Oh. My. Goodness.  It was SO good.  We tried this recipe. 

Definitely not something we can make too regularly, but those days when you *need* some chocolate, you can not go wrong with this, that’s for sure.  The dark chocolate chips we used were a bit too sweet, so next time if I use the same chocolate I will probably leave out the sugar- but that all depends on how sweet your tooth is.

Too avoid too much of a sugar rush in one post, next time I will post the greatest kettle corn recipe…

“Look, it’s moving. It’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive. It’s moving. It’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive!”

Apparently 2009 is going to be the year of the Furry Fungi Green Thumbs!  (I find it is always best to start a year with absolute optimism;) )

In just over a week, our zucchini seeds have germinated, shot up 10-15cm, and have been transplanted into their new homes, with the cucumbers not far behind them!

To be honest, we didn’t expect most of our seeds to germinate, a realistic view with our records in gardening, but we are going to be having to give away seedlings in a few weeks (days?  These things seem to grow faster than I ever thought possible).

Our rocket, spinach, snow peas, chives, lettuce, parsley, and some herbs we forgot to label have also made an appearance, but are still too small to move to their bigger pot.  The rosemary also started to make an appearance this morning (it was directly planted into the pot)

Unfortunately, the tomatoes and carrots are yet to make an appearance, but we have not given up hope on them!  It has, afterall, only been a week;)

It will be interesting to see whether everything grows as well this week, what with us both back at work and unable to check on them and ask how they are doing every hour…

I’m not usually one to make new year’s resolutions, but this year I am going to try- plus it gives me something to blog about too;)

Without further ado, here are Jessica’s goals/wishes for 2009:

• Blog more- looking better already:P
• Remove some of the chinese elms from the backyard and get a vegetable garden built and growing
• Finish at least one quilt
• Knit at least one thing- fingerless mittens
• Enrol in a photography course
• Try 5 new things
• Get fit!
• Run in my first 5km and 10km runs
• Build stage one of the planned cat enclosure
• Learn a new language (haha, doesn’t everyone put this one their lists?)
• Read a book a month (at least!  I love reading, and I have gotten really slack about it)

And that should do it for now, most are things I have been meaning to do for awhile, and just never get around to doing. 

That list sure does make me sound old huh…

I thoroughly enjoyed crafting in 2008, and I am very glad to have diversified my interests to include knitting and quilting.  This year, I want to relax and work on projects as I feel like it. 

I would like to finish two Mirabilia cross stitches (eek!).  I’m on my way to getting Mirabella done, I was hoping to have her done by the end of the year, but last minute Christmas craft took up my time (I knitted two pairs of fingerless gloves, one dishcloth, made coasters, and sewed up a dress!).

For knitting I would like to knit up a cardigan, and finish my jumper, I would also like to learn how to knit socks better, and learn to knit cables.

In quilting, I would really just like to not destroy any quilt tops this year

For my other love, running, I would *really* *really* like to run 10k this year, there’s also a part of me that would like to run a half marathon as well.  But I would be content to keep 2009 injury free….and to do that I have to accept that I cannot always push myself, if my body hurts then I have to listen to it, and not push through pain.

To the people who read this little blog, I want to thank you all for leaving comments (or not!), there’s a 99.99% chance that I read your blog as well and whilst I can be horrible at commenting, I do read, and listen and care with what you have to say.  And this year I am going to comment more!

I hope for all of us that 2009 is going to be a fantastic year!

-Stacey

Being lucky enough to have the 9 days between Christmas and New Years off work we have been making the most of the time to do a very long overdue spring summer clean.

Boxing Day we spent scrubbing and washing the front deck, thank goodness for having water tanks!  (Our city is still under some pretty strict water restrictions)  It looks lovely now, and we are planning to continue through the whole house (don’t worry I won’t be blogging a cleaning update every few hours; it doesn’t exactly make for the most interesting reading;) )

Today we spent most of the day creating a new herb/salad garden.  We don’t get a lot of sun in our backyard -although we are hopefully going to be getting some of the horrible Chinese Elms cut down in the new year- so our little herb garden is in the front yard and on the (newly cleaned front deck)  If we can keep this alive and flourishing until harvesting, then we know we are ready to get our (fairly ambitious) vegetable garden going out the back.

It doesn’t look like much yet, but we are determined to grow everything from seeds.  At the moment we have some carrots and poppies growing in there.  Most of the pot is filled with stones (to prevent the pot being easily stolen and/or blowing away) and styrofoam (so it isn’t too heavy and waterlogged).

All of our other seeds are being grown up on the deck in our seedling trolley for transplanting later:

(Yes, painting the trolley is another of my unfinished projects )

We also planted some rosemary (in the big pot) and some catgrass, catnip and camomile in the plastic pots behind:

So hopefully in a few weeks we will have some nice carrots, marigolds, thyme, chives, spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, silverbeet, basil, parsley, beans, snow-peas, oregano, and others I forget!

(And yes, I realise all of these won’t fit into our big pot, some will be transplanted into other pots on the front and back decks!)

-J

Two Quilts Bound: Check and Check

Patchwork Dress Made: Check

Last batch of Christmas Cookies made: Check

Knitted fingerless gloves finished: fail!

90% done, hopefully will finish them in the morning before presents are exchanged!

I am so tired….will it be rude if I sleep through Christmas day?

Merry Christmas Everyone, I hope everyone has a fantastic day, full of joy, fun and love!

- Stacey

Gingerbread Buttons!

They are for a local craft group I go to.  I thought they’d see the sense of humour in them!

Hope everyone is having a good holiday season!  It’s really flying here, I cannot believe Christmas (and vacation) is only 8 days away! Yay!!!

-Stacey

Well!  It HAS been awhile since I last graced this blog with an update!  See?  This is why I can’t have a blog of my own, and why I can only handle being a guest blogger on Stacey’s blog.  (let’s face it, this is really her blog…)

I, of course, have been sucked into Northrend and Wrath of the Lich King for the past month.

I have been taking my time, enjoying the scenery and just really having fun with the journey.  My main has only just hit level 75.  We play as part of an *extremely* small guild on an RP-PvP server (mainly because of our time-zone- we were there well before oceanic realms were created)  So there is mainly just the 5 of us, but you know what?  We have a lot of fun:)

On the crafting front, I am currently making (ok, ok, I have just started) a quilt for my youngest sister for christmas.  I have made some pretty christmas bunting (which turned out rather well for something I made!) and have been busy making christmas cookies:D

The weather is looking much brighter now after all the rain, and I am itching to get out there and get some nice photos again!

-J