Crafty Hijinks

Last Weekend I got up to some Hijinks. Crafty Hijinks in Ballarat. The day was organised by Jodie and Gillian of Ric-Rac and Silly Gilly. If you are not familiar with their blogs you should go and check them out now. I promise I will wait here for you. If you decide to come back, that is.

Ballarat is not just a hop, skip and a jump from here, so when I first saw that the Hijinks was happening, I dismissed it as being unfeasible. But the idea was niggling away at me. You see, I really, REALLY wanted to go. When I eventually checked the train timetables, I could see that it could be done. So I got on it and booked myself a place at Crafty Hijinks, ignoring the fact that this would see me using/waiting for public transport for almost eight hours. I just told myself it would be worth it.


I left home at a ridiculous hour and upon arrival in Ballarat, I was met by Annie Flowergarden and Little Red Hen (Jan). You should go and check out their blogs too, they are lovely, lovely ladies. Annie and Jan were entrusted with picking up the 50 scones for morning tea. Ah yes, we'll have three coffees and fifty scones please :) Haha. And then we set off for Hijinks.

Everyone got a little "sample bag" at the Hijinks, it contained all sorts of little samples, some of which you can see here.


Everyone who attended received a door prize. Rebecca's and Cathie's daughters were barrel girls and drew tickets out of the barrel. We all had a number on the back of our name badges. When the girls drew out number 40, I won this awesome pack of Cosmo embroidery threads from Gum Valley Patchwork.


In addition to sample bags and door prizes, there was also a raffle. Tickets were only $1 each and the proceeds went to charity. There were seven prizes in total. Each prize had a bucket in front of it and we could choose which buckets our tickets went into. I put most of my tickets into the bucket in front of the lightbox and was very, very excited when my ticket was drawn out!


Another thing we did was have a take what you want table. Everyone brought stash items that they no longer wanted. I filled a suitcase with fabric from home. I was really good and only grabbed this small piece of fabric to take home with me. Some of the fabric I took is going to be used to make a rag rug. It will be interesting to see if any of the fabric I took shows up transformed on someone else's blog someday.


The best part of Crafty Hijinks was catching up with all the fabulous bloggers. Some I had met before, and others who I hadn't met before, but felt like I already knew...


Rachel from Four Wise Monkeys



Lara from Thornberry and Karen from And So, I Sew



Brianna from Rolling in Fabric and Cathie from Melbourne Epicure.



Rebecca from Beccasaurus - Rebecca held a little hexagon workshop. Speaking of workshops, Jodie also did a rag-rug workshop at some stage, which I totally missed, and also Wendy of Harty Little Peaces did a bit of a workshop on colour theory.

It was nice at the end of the day to grab a lift back to Melbourne with Nikki of You Sew Girl. Thank you Nikki, I enjoyed talking with you. Thank you to Jodie and Gilly for organising the whole shebang and also, thanks to Annie and Jan for getting me from the train station to the Hijinks. And a really big thank you to all the businesses who donated items for the door prizes, raffles and goody bags - especially those prizes that I won! Thank you to those that ran workshops and thank you just to everyone who came because it wouldn't have been that much fun without you all. It was an awesome day and I have only just recovered from it.



The end result of my massive donation to the take what you want table is that I reduced my stash by 148 fat quarters. There was more fabric than that, but some of what I took was from a bag of stuff someone recently gave me. I will take that off my "fabric in" total rather than adding it to my fabric out, since I donated it, rather than sewing it.

SYST13 Running totals: in = 107, out = 95, total = +12