Merry Christmas!

I'm spending a few days with family taking a break from quilting and other routines. My goal when I get home is to clean up and organize my sewing room and prep for all my future projects. Until then, enjoy the holidays!

Bowl Cozies

A friend at work was recently bemoaning the fact the she didn't buy some quilted bowl cozies at a local craft fair. "I can make some for you!" I told her, knowing they couldn't be that hard. I've seen these around before, and sure enough, directions for how to sew them are plentiful on the internet. 

In case you don't know what these are all about, the premise is that sometimes you microwave something and then the bowl is too hot to pick up or hold. With these handy things, you plop your bowl in them, microwave the whole business and then you don't have to burn your fingers!

I made one, and it took me all of 10 minutes and was fun and easy, so then I made about 8 more and brought a whole stack into work. Now I have commissions to make some more manly ones for husbands. Plus I want to make a few for myself!

En Provence Mystery Week 2 & 3

I continue to run behind on my mystery quilt steps! I finally finished all my neutral four-patches and moved unto Week 2, which was 100 of these pink triangles. I was about 1/2 way through making them all when I realized I'd mistakenly reversed my colors! I had the pink part on the inside instead of a neutral. GARRRR!!!

Luckily, remaking them didn't take too long, but Week 3 came out before I was finished, and guess what Week 3 was? More four-patches! This time they were in purples, but still - I need almost 170 of them and for some reason I'm just slow with these.

It is gratifying to see all my pieces so far though - they are sitting in neat piles on my ironing board. I'm so curious to see how this will all turn out - we haven't even touched the yellow or green yet!

En Provence Mystery Quilt: Week 1

Bonnie Hunter released the first mystery quilt clue on the day after Thanksgiving - right when I was SO SICK! I couldn't do any sewing for days, so that put me behind on it before I even got started! At least the first clue was easy - four-patch blocks made out of scrappy neutral fabrics. The only bad thing was that I have to make 221 of them, and I'm only up to about 100. Yikes!

I had high hopes of finishing them this week in time for the next clue release on Friday, but it just didn't happen, so now I'm in catch-up mode. Bonnie suggests for those of us who fall behind, so stay with the clues and at least make a few of whatever each new one is so we can get a handle of what's going on and any what techniques it requires. I'm worried if I move on from the four-patches, I'll never go back! So I'm going to persevere and get these done before the week is over.

They're made out of neutrals, and I'm going a little out of my comfort zone and using things that will read as neutral from a distance but maybe not up close. I'm also using scraps for most of the quilt, so I'm hoping the overall look is one I like. It's hard to tell with mystery quilts. I'm just going by faith in Bonnie!

Bonnie is a stickler for accuracy. She talks about making sure our quarter-inch seams are accurate of course, but she also talks a lot about accurate cutting and giving ourselves the full width of the strip. She stresses having the line of the ruler right up on the fabric, not the mat...low and behold I've been doing it wrong all these years. It's just a thread or two, but those add up when you consider all the pieces in quilts - if each one is short a thread or two, you're talking about being inches short overall.

One other new thing I knew about but had never done, and that is spinning seams. This is when you open up a seam intersection so that you can press (or spin) the seams so that the center is nice and flat and you eliminate some bulk. Bonnie told us to give it a try, and I'm loving the results so far - nice flat four-patches that are accurately sized. It's a miracle!

November Mini Quilt

I'm a little behind on my mini quilts due to being sick and christmas sewing and whatnot. The pattern for November is autumn leaves, and it seems a little weird to be sewing them now since the leaves are long gone here in MN and it's all barren and gray.

Nonetheless, it's been fun to sew these  - the quilt has five larger leaves, and then 20 teeny-tiny ones. I'm working on the bigger ones now, and will tackle the tiny ones tonight. It's mostly lots of half-square triangles, and so far so good.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas Quilt

My holiday spirit ebbs and flows. Some years I'm all about the christmas trees and music and baking and family times, and then some years I just want to skip the whole thing and fast-forward to January 2nd. No matter what though, "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" has been a solid mainstay. My mother would bring out our well-worn copy of it after thanksgiving, and read it to us constantly over the next month. I still know it all by heart:

"Every Who down in Whoville liked Christmas a lot.
But the Grinch who lived just north of Whoville did not.
The Grinch hated Christmas, the whole christmas season.
Now please don't ask why, no one quite knows the reason."

This year, I'm all about christmas. I'm making home-made christmas ornaments, I signed up for three holiday baking classes (I just took the Truffles one....YUM), and it only seemed right that I make a christmas quilt. The best thing is that I found a Grinch Christmas Quilt pattern and material!

This is an easy quilt to make - it's just 6 inch squares, bordered by the striped fabric and polka dot cornerstones. I had it sewn together in about 3 hours, added the two big borders, and done! I'm going to try and get this quilted and bound so it'll be ready to cuddle up with in front of the tree. Yes...there will be a tree this year!

Friday Finish: Monkey Wrench

Well Hellooooo! I'm alive, but phew - it's been a rough couple of weeks. I was struck down by some hellish virus...first it was a cold, then it was a flu, then it was a sinus infection, then it was a migraine. It was the kind of sickness where you lose hope of ever feeling good again, but at long last I'm on the mend.

So sewing hasn't been happening much. Every now and then I'd hobble into my sewing room, plop down and stare at my machine for awhile and then hobble back to the sofa. That was about it.

Finally, when I started feeling better on Tuesday I figured I could at least finish up the binding on the Monkey Wrench quilt. I was excited to take a picture, but it's MN, so this happened:

When the sleet let up, I quickly dashed outside with the quilt, determined to get a photo for Friday Finish - first one in FOREVER!

This was made using Anita Grossman-Solomon's Sew-on-the-Lines technique that I wrote about here. It's a fun way to put blocks together, but I don't know that it saves time in in the long run. For me, the pluses were great accuracy with little effort, and not having to cut all the fabric pieces - you just take two squares of fabric and slap them together to make the block, and it gets cut apart after you sew the lines.

I quilted it in a figure 8 pattern, which is quick and easy. The backing is an orange floral from Connecting Threads, and I inserted a strip of leftover scraps of fabric from the front into it just for fun.

This is a large lap quilt/baby quilt size, and so far isn't earmarked for anyone in particular. It'll go on the stack in my linen closet until it finds a good home.