Some Small Christmas Presents

 Hi all -

Time is flying and the holidays are fast approaching! But since we're doing Secret Santa with my family, my holiday gift making has been severely reduced. I have to say, it's really nice to not have all of that pressure! I had finished my "required" gifts in my last post and I had some extra time, so I decided to make a few small gifts for the sister who I stay with when I visit. The full family Christmas celebration isn't until 12/28, so this sister and I will be hanging out together on Christmas day without anyone else around. And she loves to cook so I know she'll be cooking special meals and snacks for me on Christmas day and throughout my visit. It's only right that I should have some fun stuff for her to open on Christmas morning!

The first thing I made for my sister was a silicon trivet. I had picked up the base for the trivet at a local quilt shop last year, intending to make it for my sister, but hadn't gotten around to it yet.

Hot Stuff Trivet package

I pulled out the package and started work. First, I picked out my fabric. The fabric shows through the trivet, but is muted, so I wanted a beautiful large-scale print that was bright. I found a perfect flower print in. my stash! I quilted one piece of the fabric for the bottom of the trivet and fussy cut another piece of the fabric to show through the front. Then, following the included instructions, I added a border and binding.

Hot Stuff Trivet - top

Hot Stuff Trivet - bottom

This was really easy and fun to make, and I think it will be really useful. My sister hosts all of our family get-togethers so often has a large table full of hot dishes!

One of the crafts I've been wanting to try for a while is making rope bowls. I had picked up some different rope in the past, but always got busy with other stuff and put it aside. One of the ladies on the quilting forum that I read had shown some bowls that she had made, and that piqued my interest again. So I ordered the book that she suggested (Zigzag Rope Sewing Projects by Katherine Lile) and got some of the rope that she had used for her bowls and started playing. To get the feel for things, I decided to make some trivets. That way I could get the feel for the sewing without having to worry about the shaping. And I could play with the different ropes I had to see how they worked. I started with the rope that the lady on my quilting forum had suggested and made this trivet for my sister:

My Sister's Trivet

To give it color, I grabbed some small scraps from my scrap bin and wrapped them around the rope as shown in the book. I started with a red and a green and then realized that these colors matched the fabric that I had used for my sister's silicon trivet, so I picked through my scraps and added scraps from the trivet fabric and other matching colors to make a trivet that went with the other trivet that I made for her. This rope worked really well. Next I used some cotton clothesline that I had in my stash and made this trivet:

My Neighbor's Trivet

I went monochromatic with this trivet and played with colored thread. I was originally making this one for a friend, but ended up giving it to my neighbor instead because she loves purple. This rope also worked really well. The next trivet was for another friend. This one used another rope that I had in my stash:

My Friend's Trivet

This "rope" was really a cotton piping that is designed to be covered by fabric, but I used it uncovered. It makes a sturdy "fabric" where it is coiled, but the hanging loop isn't as nice as the loops from the other trivets. For this trivet, I did all of the sewing with white cotton thread and then splattered the finished trivet with some bottled inks that I found on my shelf that are designed for stamping. I really liked how the colors look different on the threads that on the cotton base. Finally, since I gave my first friend's trivet to my neighbor, I made another one for my friend. Unfortunately, I didn't get pictures of this one since I made it the evening before I gave it to her. For this one, I used variegated thread, a narrow zigzag and added matching fabric scraps for a trivet with a lot of color. These were definitely a lot of fun to make and they work up very quickly! I'm moving on to other stuff, so will come back sometime in the future to start learning how to do the shaping for bowls and other objects.

Next, I decided to also make a bag for my sister. I looked through my patterns and decided on the Huntington Hobo bag by Pink Sands Beach Designs. I looked through my fabric stash and found an old Hoffman Challenge fabric that I really liked. Since I like to make bags and I do everything on the spur of the moment, I had a large stash of zippers and other bag-making supplies to go with my fabric stash. Here is the bag I ended up making:

Huntington Hobo Bag - front

Huntington Hobo Bag - back

Huntington Hobo Bag - Inside

I think my sister will like this bag!

I decided that I had made enough gifts so I went back to some of my own projects. Back when I was making the Baby Elephant quilt, I had quilted a panel to use for the largest size of the Project Bags 2.0 pattern from ByAnnie so I decided to finish the bag:

Project Bag - Front

Project Bag - Back

I like this style of project bag for my English Paper Piecing (EPP) projects because it keeps the smaller units flat, so I'll be using this bag for my La Passacaglia quilt.

Speaking of my La Passacaglia quilt, I added another round to my first unit in this quilt:

La Passacaglia - Unit 1

I'm finding that with this quilt what is taking me the longest is deciding what fabrics to use everywhere. This is a very chaotic-looking quilt and I'm not one for doing a lot of planning for my quilts. I do know that I want to use only Tula Pink fabrics for this quilt, so that narrows down the choices. I've been looking at my fabrics and pondering what I want to do, and finally forced myself to just go for it with the black fabric so I could work on this project at our monthly EPP group meeting. There are some other shapes like this in the quilt, so I'll repeat the same black fabric on some or all of the other similar shapes, while varying the colors and designs used for the stars inside the shapes. This should reduce the chaos a bit while keeping the scrapiness. We'll see how it grows!

A couple of months ago, one of my quilt guilds had an on-line auction to raise money. The auction included finished quilts, unquilted tops, kits, collections of fabric and smaller quilted items. I picked up several items from the auction, including a couple of kits. One of the kits is for the Posy Pocket Handbags pattern by Crabapple Hill. This kit was donated by the estate of an obviously highly prolific crafter and included the pattern and fabrics for two bags. I finished the embroidery for the first bag:

Posy Pocket Handbag - Embroidery

The kit didn't include the fabric or thread for the embroidery, so I pulled those from my stash along with the buttons. I'll put this bag together before starting the embroidery for the second bag just in case I want to make any changes to how I make the bag.

I've also been doing some knitting. I've continued to make some progress on my Stitchscape Shawl designed by Malia Mae Joseph:

Stitchscape Shawl

Stitchscape Shawl - Close-up

As I've said before, I really love working on this shawl! It's just so squishy and wonderful, and the colors take my breath away! But the rows are getting very long (close to 400 stitches per row now), so it'll take a while to finish it.

Finally, I started another knitting project. The Stitchscape Shawl is getting pretty big and the current section has you working with three colors of yarn at once, so this isn't a good project for traveling. I had some yarn that I wanted to play with and I wanted to see how I liked using Addi FlexiFlips needles, so I decided to start working on a Mimizan Hat designed by Tess Young.  So far, I have the ribbing finished:

Mimizan Hat

I learned from the brim of the hat that you definitely need good lighting when knitting with black yarn! The body of the hat will be worked with a green yarn as well as the black yarn, so should be a little easier depending on how difficult the stitch pattern is to figure out.

That's it for now. Sorry for the long post! I didn't get around to posting last week, so the projects added up. I'm not sure if I'll get another post in before I go to Kansas City to visit the family, but I don't tend to do much crafting while visiting so the next post should be of reasonable length no matter when I make it.

Nancy

Oak Leaves Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday! I had a quiet holiday at home and was able to finish my quilt for my brother-in-law. It feels so good to have everything done! This year the family decided to do a Secret Santa Christmas, so that's the only gift I have to make. It's been nice not to have the pressure of having to make so many gifts!

As I mentioned, I was able to finish my Oak Leaves quilt this week:

Oak Leaves

I love how it turned out, even though the quilting is far from perfect! If you look closely at the photo, you will see that the quilt has that scrunchy, soft finish. I don't usually wash quilts before gifting them because I love the crisp feel of a new, unwashed quilt and I want the recipient to enjoy that feeling, too. But I used a thick wash-away stabilizer for the applique and I wanted to soak out that stiffness before gifting the quilt. To remove the stabilizer, I soaked the quilt in the tub and periodically agitated it to help the stabilizer dissolve. Then I moved the quilt to the washer and ran it through a light soil cycle. I had put a sheet under the quilt when I put it in the tub so I wouldn't have to worry about the weight of the water distorting the quilt when I moved it to the washer. It all worked really well! For the quilting in the brown squares, I used a ruler to quilt straight lines emphasizing half square triangle nature of the log cabin blocks.

Oak Leaves - Quilting

While this was an easy quilting design, I found that I kept quilting the lines to the wrong end points. When your nose is that close to the quilt, it's really hard to distinguish the vertices! I spent a lot of time removing errant lines, and I made the decision to leave some in that I didn't think anyone would notice but me! Another thing I realized after doing several blocks is that the two possible diagonals of the brown-only squares are not the same and it's hard to see which diagonal is the one that matches the diagonal in the half and half squares. By the end of the quilting, I was doing a lot of marking to keep myself on track! But, like I said, I think it looks good and nobody will notice the problems but me. I used a Quilter's Select ruler to do the straight line quilting:

Quilter's Select Ruler

I purchased this ruler several years ago when they first came out, but had never used it before. It is a really nice ruler! Quilter's Select rulers have a kind of sticky backing designed to reduce slipping. They have this coating on both their rotary cutting rulers and their quilting rulers. I find that this coating works really well! I didn't have any problem with this ruler slipping through all of this quilting, regardless of what awkward position I had things in to do the quilting. These rulers are, however, fairly expensive. But I will still keep my eyes open for sales on these rulers and pick up some other shapes when I have the opportunity.

When the quilt was done, I dug through my collection of Christmas fabrics and I made a gift bag for it:

Oak Leaves - Gift Bag

This is a bigger gift bag, so the cording I've used in the past for smaller gift bags seemed too light for this bag, so I've ordered some 3/4" red ribbon that I will run through the casing and tie in a bow to hold the bag closed. In the past, I've spent a lot of time making very polished gift bags that were lined with a slick lining fabric and had all of the fabrics stabilized. I decided that this gift bag would probably not get much use in the future and I didn't want to spend that much time on the gift bag or make it as heavy, so I simplified my process. I decided not to use any lining and instead used an overlock stitch on my machine to finish the raw edges on the inside of the bag to prevent fraying. I also didn't use any stabilizer. I thought about sewing some handles, like you would have on a tote bag, to make it easier to carry the bag, but decided that would look funny and would be overkill. I made a similar gift bag for the Baby Elephant quilt:

Baby Elephant - Gift Bag

So now I'm completely ready for Christmas!

During my TV time (it's NFL and college basketball season!), I've continued to work on my Stitchscape Shawl designed by Malia Mae Joseph:

Stitchscape Shawl

I continue to love working on this shawl! It's so squishy and the colors are so beautiful! The first part of this shawl has really gone swiftly, but things are slowing down as the rows get longer and longer. Each row is now over 300 stitches long! Good thing I'm enjoying it!!

I hope everyone is enjoying their winter (although it's not officially winter yet...) and things aren't too stressful getting ready for the holidays!

Nancy