I hope you're having a wonderful holiday season! I've just returned from my trip home for Christmas. As usual, it was wonderful! I have to say that I am exceedingly lucky to have the family that I have. We all love and respect each other. We have disagreements, but we don't have fights. This is something that I wish everyone could experience! And now we have the joy of starting to see our family grow. Our next generation are starting to find life partners and get married, and soon we will start seeing another generation. It warms my heart!
But on to the crafting.....
My top project, my niece's graduation quilt, was finished just in time. The quilting always takes a lot longer than expected. We also had a lot of trouble with power outages, but luckily I put the binding on the quilt early so those hit mostly when I was hand-stitching the binding to the back of the quilt. Here is the finished quilt, ultimately named Inclusion:
And the finished back:
I used a different quilting fill pattern in each of the different colors of hexagons:
And here's the label I made for the quilt:
The quilt is far from perfect, but I still love how it turned out. And I think my niece really likes it, too. This is my last graduation quilt, at least for this generation. So now I'll be moving on to the wedding quilts. 😃
I also finished up one last Christmas gift since my last post. I made the fourth dish towel for another niece:
This made a nice set and she really liked them. These are made with Dishie cotton yarn from KnitPicks. We've all found this yarn to be wonderful for dishcloths and dish towels. It really soaks up the water well and can be thrown in the washer with no problems (I've even used bleach with my Dishie dishcloth with just a small reduction in color). I've had several requests for more of these so you'll be seeing more of these in the future.
Once the Christmas gifts were finished, I took some time to work on my other projects. I finished the November installment for my Jimmy Beans shawl club project, the Sunshower Shawl by Ambah O'Brien:
Just one more month, and this project will be finished!
I also started working on my 2019 Jimmy Beans Craftvent shawl project. The Craftvent project is packaged as an advent calendar, with a bit of yarn and pattern instructions or a little prize for each day from Dec 1-24. This is a really fun project for the Christmas season! This is my second year of participating. Last year, I was caught up enough with Christmas that I was able to sneak in a little time each day to keep up with the calendar until I left for my trip to see my family. This year, I was too far behind to start on time, but I was able to do a few days and have now finished through the Dec 9 section:
The pattern for this shawl is Spirits of the Season by Amy Gunderson. The shape of the shawl is a long, skinny triangle that I think will be fun to wear as a scarf. Hopefully, this will be finished by my next post.
I've also received some more things in the mail that I need to work on. First, I got the last two installments of the Jimmy Beans knit club Oct-Dec project, Kickshaws by Shanel Wu:
These will be a pair of slippers that I'm looking forward to trying. If I like them, they might be something fun to make for the family.
And I've received the November Lola's Choice project, Umami Mitts by Laura Nelkin:
I love fingerless mitts and these have an interesting stitch pattern on the back, so I'm looking forward to working on this project.
And I'll also be starting on my big project for 2020 soon: my niece's wedding quilt. I've shared the pattern for this quilt in earlier posts. I bought a kit for the quilt at a price that was hard to beat, but I'll be adding some of my own fabrics to the quilt. The kit has floral fabrics and I'll be adding Asian fabrics to fit the Japanese garden theme, since her fiancee popped the question in a Japanese garden at the botanical gardens in Austin, TX. I'll share more about this quilt as I make progress on it. I have until August 28 to finish......
Nancy
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