Gifts received and Given

Well it’s been a mad few days recently with having to cook two Christmas dinners two days in a row. My back was so sore it’s amazing it feels as good as it does today but it’s all over. Everyone has eaten so much food in the last couple of days what with dinners and treats that I’m letting them fend for themselves with the leftovers until they leave.

I’m behind on posting pictures of items that I made for Christmas and I now have pictures to post of items that I received for Christmas so…

Here are some of the things I made in the mad scramble in the last two days before Christmas.

Some crocheted washcloths for Dan’s girlfriend to go along with some other toiletry items in a gift basket.

A couple more in different colours for John’s mom they went with a basket of Aveeno products. These washcloths were inspired by a post over at Thornberry’s site: http://thornberry.wordpress.com/ and the pattern taken from Lion’s brand free patterns. This is the sedge washcloth. Just type in washcloth and you’ll find it.

Bernat Handicrafter Cotton – Colonial Colours.

My one son Jon informed me that he wanted a Where’s Waldo Hat to go along with his striped scarf. This was two days before Christmas. Of course I didn’t have the one set of correct needles so it was a mad scramble to find some but I finished the hat Christmas Eve. Here is the other son Dan modelling for me.

I thought this hat would be striped but the cartoon of Waldo shows it as red brim, white body and red pompom for which I was thankful as it made it easier to knit. He now wants a striped sweater to match (oh joy).

Next are a series of photos of the gifts I received from my secret sister. We decided to swap items that we already had on hand at home and I feel like I cleaned up from what she pulled from her stash (does the happy dance).

Here we have a foam stamp (I can use it on my hand-dyed fabric), some Angelina hot fuse fibres and a cute fly that she had made in a class she took. He’s so adorable.

This is the back view and he has “metallic” wings, so clever.

Look at this, he even has pockets inside of him. (He came with a chocolate bar inside, yum…)

I got this cool piece of complex cloth.

In a complex cloth swap what happens is the owner of the piece dyes a piece of white pfd (prepared for dyeing) in the colour of her choice. The piece is then mailed off to the next person in the group and this person then does something to the piece. In this case although you really can’t see it I believe a discharge of some type in the shape of a fish was applied to the cloth so the fuchsia became pink in those areas.

Next a stamp of purple (or blue) dye was applied over top and then finally a pattern of blue metallic paint (probably lumiere but maybe shiva paintstick) was put on as a last layer. I don’t know if this piece was part of a swap or something my secret sister did all herself but all in all it’s a very valuable piece of fabric for all the time and effort that went into it. I’m going to have to think how to use it , maybe for part of a quilt or maybe that special bit of fabric that is just the right accent for something.

Last is this beautiful piece of machine embroidery. Lovely matching fabric of yellows and purples. It is now taking up residence on the wall in back of my sewing machine.

Speaking of sewing machines…here is my new baby.

Husqvarna Mega Quilter.

MegaQuilter with table.

I haven’t had a chance to use it yet as I still have company but sometime this week we have a date to work on the Christmas tree skirt I just finished sewing.

One last picture just because you all know how I like a bargin (even if I don’t need it).

Drop-forged Heritage scissors.

I saw these at Costco the other day but refrained from buying them because I have a lot of scissors but when they dropped the price to $10 I couldn’t resist. I’m always misplacing scissors so didn’t feel too guilty at ten bucks for three.

Well hope you all like seeing the goodies as much as I liked receiving them.

Karen

Christmas Tree Skirt

Currently I’m working on a Christmas tree skirt. I’d planned to have it done and it’s possible that I might have except I want to machine quilt it and have decided to wait until after Christmas to do so because I’m getting a new MegaQuilter from Husqvarna for Christmas. My current machine is prone to bunching up thread on the underside of whatever project I’m working on so I’m not even going to try working with that machine.

Anyhow, here is a picture of the skirt so far:

Christmas tree skirt pattern by Lynette Jenson “Thimbleberries”

The pattern is from Lynette Jenson’s book “The Thimbleberries Book of Quilts”. The original pattern was very nice with three different shades of red material for the scalloped part and white in the middle with plaid bias. I didn’t really like the reds I had in my stash so I went with Christmas fabric instead. I found that the piece was too small for my tree and that the presents wouldn’t really sit on the skirt so I decided to extend it by adding some white and gold print fabric. I then blanket stitched around the scalloped edge to match the stitching on the holly leaves and berries in the middle section.

The benefit of adding this material aside from extending the skirt is that I won’t have to deal with fiddly bias binding around scallops. I do have some plaid to bind the edges so hopefully it’ll spruce up the gold print and give it some definition. The extra space will give me more practise room for some feathers I want to learn to machine quilt. I figure even if it turns out to be a rough first piece of machine quilting, the quilt itself will mostly be covered up by presents anyhow.

Karen

Not So Secret Sister Swap

I participated in a secret sister swap recently with my fabric dyeing forum but wanted to wait until after my secret sister opened her gift to blog it. We had a choice of two swaps to enter and since my friend and I were the only two signed up for the secret sister swap we decided to call it the “not so secret sister swap”, lol. Anyhow we gave each other a few hints of what we liked.

Since J mentioned that her favorite colours were red, blue and purple I decided that since we belonged to a fabric dyeing forum I would start off there. I decided to do a colour wheel in Boysenberry, Sapphire and Ultra Violet.

Sapphire-Boysenberry-Ultra Violet colour run

Fat eighth bundle.

At the same time I did this colour run I decided to do another one of Grecian rose, Island blue and Lemon Meringue.

Grecian Rose-Island Blue-Lemon Meringue

With the left over dyes I created a couple of parfaits doing a scrunch-ball method instead of my usual vase method. In the ball method you basically scrunch the material into a ball and hold together with a couple of rubber bands, then apply the dye. With this method the dye blends more in globs (can’t think of a better word sorry). In the vase method when I cram the material down into a vase you get more blending as the dye creeps along the folds so it’s more linear if that makes sense – the dye settles in the folds so it has a creased look.

Boysenberry – Sapphire blue – Ultra violet parfait

Grecain Rose - Lemon Merginue - Island blue

Trying to find ideas online I came across a couple of tutorials from Sew Mama Sew and decided to create some mug rugs and a tea wallet in the matching colours.

Mug Rugs

Tea Wallet

Inside of tea wallet

To finish up the handmade part of the gift I made a necklace and earrings from my bead stash.

Beaded necklace and earrings

I’m back to working on the Christmas tree skirt for the tree. The only decision I have left is whether or not to just baste it together and then quilt it on my new sewing machine (megaQuilter by husqvarna) after Christmas or to try and do it on the old machine. Not really a decision as I have visions of caught threads on the back of the quilt with the old machine so I’ll just put it under the tree and pretend it’s quilted, besides which it’ll be covered up with prezzies anyway.

Karen

Crayon Rolls

I finally finished the crayon rolls for the Sunday school for Christmas. I used a variety of kids prints I’d been collecting all year long with some of my hand-dyed fabric, lol, I went and checked the link to the tutorial in last year’s post and noticed last year the hand-dyes were part of the background whereas this year I’d used them to make the pockets. Here they are all sixteen of them.

Finished crayon rolls.

Crayon Roll

Lots of different kids prints.

You can find the tutorial for these here:
http://www.skiptomylou.org/2007/04/25/on-a-roll/

Karen

Christmas stuff

I’ve been busy doing things but not taking time to post so I guess I’ve been a bad blogger, sorry. I have done some stuff but a lot of it was for a Christmas secret sister swap that I participated in so since it was secret I thought I’d better not post about what I was doing. I’ll put some pictures up once my gift has been received.

A couple of items that I can post about are the hat and scarf set I finished about a week ago. I like to buy yarn on sale and then knit up scarves and hats to give away to whomever needs them. I’d already given away most of what I had except for this set so when our bible study group decided to put together a care package for a women’s shelter one of the items needed was a hat so I volunteered to supply this set:

Buffy the koala bear with hat and scarf

Many thanks to Buffy for once again modeling yet again another hat and scarf. I’ve been working on making some crayon rolls for the past three days. It’s one of those simple projects that you think you’ll get accomplished in a day. The reality is that I have 16 of them to do and it’s been a major fiddly pain working on them. I’ve been tired lately and it just seems that everything is progressing in slow motion. Anyhow I’ve promised them for the sunday school class Christmas eve so need to finish them now!

Fabric cut out for crayon rolls - a variety of kids prints plus co-ordinating hand-dyed fabric by moi.

I did manage to finish one off today (yeah for at least one). I have done the tricky part on all of them which is to make the pockets for the crayons. Now all I need to do is sew the zig-zag and outer piece on and they’ll be finished. Of course I ran out of white ribbon, just one more thing. I think I’m a little to tired tonight to be positive. LOL, you think you have a lot of time for Christmas and your husband tells you it’s 2 1/2 weeks away…say WHAT!!!

Needless to say nothing is decorated and the house is a bomb and now my dearest MIL will probably be coming for a few days and of course her room (the sewing room) is a disaster (and I do have before photos). The Christmas tree skirt I was positive was going to get done this year seems to be on the “put-off” list, oh well. How is it possible to be unemployed and yet be able to waste entire days at a time with nothing to show for it? Well one answer is this computer, so saying – good night all.

Karen

Closet Organization

Time seems to have slipped away once again. Today I thought I’d blog about my closet that I cleaned out last week. Actually I took the photos meaning to blog it and then realised I hadn’t…old age setting in I guess.

Anyhow people were amazed when I told them that I spent “3″ days organizing the closet but I have to admit that although I worked at it steadily it was in between breaks and daily stuff. I managed to get most stuff off the floor and clear out some space for the clothes hanging in there. I had an incredible amount of stuff on the floor because there was no space up top so once the stuff on the floor was gone I had about another two foot section that could be used to hang clothes on the rack.

I basically put back everything that was in there but did it using plastic storage boxes ($230.00 worth of them). Hmm…I lie, I did buy three under-the-bed storage bins so I guess not everything went back in. I didn’t take a before picture so can’t give you perspective but I do have the afters to give an idea.

First trial with bin for old pictures and frames.

Pull-out shelves that had an incredible amount of stuff in them, cleaned and now used for sock and sweater storage.

Fabric up and off the shelves (now protected from dust) with quilt batts tucked in beside them.

Under-the-bed storage bin being filled with full balls of yarn and left-over projects.

Picture of another bin full of yarn under the bed.

This is left-over yarn remnants and yarn from my mother-in-law. I had these stored in plastic zip bags the kind you get comforters in but they are kind of bulky-sloppy to store.

One huge bin of the remnants, discovered some full balls in there. I was going to donate this stuff to the church group until I realised that I had enough to make several afghans so decided to work on it myself.

Another two bins of the remnants, one is fuzzy yarn and the other my crochet cotton for my oven towels.

View of more bins of yarn, beads, projects, etc.

New look of top shelf after adding the big bin of yarn, unfortunately the boxes that were up there had to go back on the floor but at least they are now managable and out of sight.

The thing with the bins is that you can stack stuff in them that would otherwise fall out or down off the shelves and it looks neat and tidy so it does free up more room. Another bonus is that it’ll keep the dust off. I had to vacumn some dust off of one unfinished project at one point of the clean-up. I found a lot of usable items that I had forgotten about. All in all you’re looking at about 30 years worth of collected craft materials. Some of the yarn left-overs go back to when I was 14 years old. I’m hoping to crochet some of those granny square afghans, lol, I just bought four more balls of black to do this. More yarn to use up yarn? Works for me.

Karen