Handmade Christmas pot holders

I've been having computer problems, but it's been so long since I've posted,  I decided to do what I could with our laptop. Unfortunately I don't have any photo editing software on it, so I had to use Picasa to crop and lighten photos. I do have a handful of posts to put up so will be blogging a lot this week.

Last year for Christmas, I started making hot pad holders for my Mom but they did not get finished. All they needed was binding, so once I finished them up, I decided to make some more.

 Front side, finished:

Back side shown on left:

I had made my Aunt some Christmas place mats and thought I'd pull out those fabrics and make some matching pot holders. See the place mat post here.

I already had some strips left over from the place mats, but had to cut some more. 

I sewed the strips together and ironed the seams. Then I cut on a 45 degree angle from the seams and cut 4 1/2" wide strips.  I then cut them into 4 1/2" squares.

 Here are all my squares. I played with the alignment and which square would go where.

Here is my final arrangement.  I decided the best finished size was 6 1/2" x 9". The first (purple) set was only 8" long and it left the wrist exposed, which I did not like. 6 1/2" wide let my fingers reach the side edges of the hot pad without them swimming around in the pocket. I cut two edges of my quilt top so the middle seam was still centered.

 So here are my layers: quilt top, heat resistant batting, cotton batting, back fabric and pocket (which is 16" long and folded/ironed in half, so the pocket piece is roughly 1" shorter than the rest of the pot holder).

Here are the finished pot holders. I could have done some free motion quilting on them but decided they may be more heat resistant without it.

 Back side shown on the left:

 I used this tutorial for doing the binding. There are things I liked and things I did not like about it, but it did the job. Hers looks way better than mine did. When sewing the front side, if I sewed it close to the edge of the binding, it did not catch the binding on the backside, I ended up sewing farther in from the edge than I would have liked. If anyone has a good all machine binding technique, please let me know. I did zig zag stitch all the layers together before adding the binding.

Then I made a pair for my sister. I think these are really fun. I just made a strip of different fabrics, each 2 1/2" high, width varies from 1" to 2 1/4" wide. I sewed a 3/4" strip to the top and bottom of the pieced panel, then added the larger pieces at either end. The purple ones at the top of this post were done the same way.

These were pretty quick to make and were well received at our Thanksmas (Christmas at Thanksgiving) celebration last week!

Back from North Carolina

I visited with my parents and my sister's family in North Carolina for Thanksgiving and we had our family Christmas while we were all there.  We call it Thanksmas.  I won't go into family stuff since I consider this an art blog, but suffice it to say, it was a really good visit.

On the art front, I went to AC Moore while I was there (an art supply store, I always find something good) and they had a bunch of Decolorant on clearance.  They were marked $7.50, but rang up as $1.66 each. Sweet deal. I got this price on a big jar of regular decolorant, a 3 pack of red, yellow, and blue colors, and a bottle of spray decolorant.  I am planning to play with these later in the week.

We went down to the art district in Winston-Salem one day, as my mom wanted to go to the bead store (Bubbling Well Bead and Tea Bar) to get some help and supplies for a necklace she was making. It was a lovely bead shop and they were very helpful.  Their bead displays were beautiful. The link to their website is here.  Their chai was good as well!

 Here is my mom working on her necklace.

The art district has a lot of galleries, funky shops, and murals. I liked this one.

By the time we were leaving the  bead shop, the fiber art shop a few doors down had already closed for the day (at 3, I was sad).  We did go to the Piedmont Craftsmen store and they had a lot of variety of art and craft. I really like the work of the felt artist they had.  They had a sign that said, "no pictures" so I did not take any. I don't see a picture of her art on their website either. I wandered around in there for probably a half an hour. 

I got back from N.C. late Friday and Allen's brother's family have been visiting which has been nice. They live in California and we don't see them very often.  They will be headed back later today and I plan to get going on a lot of projects this week. I did paint some canvas fabric while I was in North Carolina, we will see if they become finished pieces.

Handmade pillows for Christmas gifts

I decided to make my Mom two pillows for Christmas, back in June, when I found this dogwood (or is it magnolia?) fabric at a sewing expo.  I knew she would love this fabric.

I looked in my stash for fabrics that would go well with this. I had a bunch of "linen-look" fabric in a yellow-beige that I had inherited from a friend.  I also pulled out some fat quarters for accent fabrics and bought some dark brown as well.

Here I am auditioning the arrangement of the fabrics for the mitered corner pillow. I went with the second one as I liked the contrast of the brown with the floral.

Here are my finished pillows.

 For the mitered corner pillow, I sewed the yellow-beige, polka dot, and brown fabrics into four matching strips. Then used I used this website to figure out how to miter these to the floral fabric. The fabrics aligned pretty well with this technique.

For the other pillow, I sewed strips of my accent fabrics to together. I used the bird template from a book I got at the library. I will amend this post when I am home and will add the book name. The book is Mixed and Stitched by Jen Osborn.

I ironed fusible web on the fabrics for the bird, traced the template on each fabric (traced on the paper protection on the backside fusible web, remember this will be reverse of the finished piece) and cut them out (cutting the brown one bigger than the polka dot one). I ironed the polka dot bird to the brown one, then ironed them both to the floral fabric. I free motion stitched around both bird shapes twice (with matching thread). I then sewed this piece to the accent strip.

I backed both of the pillow fronts with Warm and White cotton batting to make them a bit more durable and stitched in the ditch at all the seams.  I then added a zipper and the the pillow backs and was done. The birdie is super cute! We are having our family Christmas this week and I am sure my Mom will love these!

Christmas quilted placemats

In the last few days, I made patchwork placemats for a Christmas gift (to be given this week).

For these placemats, I made patchwork blocks on the diagonal, which were then sewn together.  My patchwork squares were roughly 6" x 6" for a finished placemat size of 12" x 18" (six squares). This design is similar to the patchwork trivets and table runner in Quilting Arts TV episode 711.

All my fabric strips below are sorted for each block. (Yes, there is some organization here even though it doesn't look like it!)

Here are the fabrics laid out for a block.

I sewed one block.

I put the sewn block on my cardboard template, and it is wayyyyy to small.  I added a solid red fabric and cut a strip of red for each block so they would all be big enough.

Here are most of my blocks sewn and ironed.

I tried different layouts for my blocks. The instructions (that I was semi-following) said to make diamond shapes but since I had 6 blocks per placemat I only had one and a half diamonds.

I thought about putting them in a Chevron type pattern.

Here are the final results. I cut two blocks in half (for each) and moved my diamond shape to the middle.

Lovely!

12/2/2013: See here for matching hot pad holders.

Wool roving on soap

For some of my Thanksmas/Christmas gifts, I decided to cover some soap with wool roving and felt it. This make the soap bar almost like a loofah and it will continue to felt with use as well.

I had never done this before, or any wet felting, but how hard could it be?

I learned that starting very gently pays off in the end (from my first four not so good attempts).  I first wrapped my soap with white roving. It is best to do one layer and dampen it with hot water (dribbled on) and pat it to the soap. Another layer the opposite direction, another wetting/patting, then the third layer the same direction as the first, wet and pat. In the picture below, I started felting it before adding the colored roving, which was a bad idea. The colored layer didn't want to stick to the white layer because the white fibers were too far along in felting.

 Once I got to bar number 5 (yes it took that long), I found I needed to rub tiny gentle small circles to the white roving (after all layers were applied) for a short amount of time, then add the colored roving in one direction only. I did more tiny gentle small circles until all the fibers seemed to be attaching, sprinkling with hot water every now and then. Then I took a piece of bubble wrap and started rubbing in earnest.

This is bar #2, I had felted the white roving too much before adding the colored roving, and the colored roving didn't want to "stick" and was very lumpy.

Here are my felted soaps. The turquoise on the top left and purple/blue at bottom left were bars 5 and 6, and are my best ones.  I did not want to over-felt as they will felt more with use. I did go back to the other bars and rubbed them with hot water and bubble wrap and it did help somewhat with getting the colored roving to felt to the white. I still had to cut off some lumpy parts. My hands smelled like honeysuckle and orange peel for the rest of the day.

Thanksmas, Christmas at Thanksgiving

My sister likes to have Christmas at their house for the kids, but my Dad can't travel for health reasons. So we all go to my parent's house at Thanksgiving and celebrate our family Christmas then (dubbed Thanksmas).

I am not much of a pre-planner when it comes to Christmas shopping. I often wait until the week before Thanksmas to shop for gifts (we are talking mid-November, so I am not fighting the Christmas crowds). This year I have a lot of handmade gifts planned so I have to kick it in gear now.

As luck would have it, I have some gifts that I started for last Thanksmas that did not get finished in time, so they are already done or partially completed. I am only going to post projects for the kids and projects that the recipients know about, so I don't totally ruin the surprise.

We always seem to be short on stockings at Thanksmas so I thought last year I'd make some for my sister's kids. They were not done in time but I did finish them when I got back. I made these out of felted sweaters. As you can see I had to put a seam in the darker one as the sweater was not big enough, but I think it looks like part of the design. I did make sure to align the stripes when attaching them together. I hand embroidered their names at the top. I think they turned out great, but feel I should have made the stockings bigger and also used thicker thread for the embroidery.

I have new projects planned as well. I went to a rockin' 50% off yarn sale the other day. I bought yarn to make scarves for the kids (blend of Merino wool, cashmere, and acrylic). As I was knitting along on the first one, I realized that one skein was not enough yarn. So I decided to make it a neck scarf, the type that has the hole in it to pull the other end through. I've made good progress on the first one and may have enough yarn to get to the recommended 22" final length. I tried it out and I hope my 6 year old niece has a skinnier neck than I do!  I think it will be okay, and I will make sure to block it when I am done. This is a simple pattern, K a row, then K2, P2 (repeat) across the second row, and repeat these two rows. The hole is from 14" to 17". I used 26 stitches across, the original pattern was for 30.

I think I will be making my nephew a hat instead as it's a bit girlie.