Gifts Galore!

Most of today was spent enjoy football, food, and the company of our friends. However, this evening I took some time to do a few quick quilting projects. 

As I mentioned yesterday evening, I wanted to make the Tissue Holder that was featured on the Riley Blake Designs website. To do this all you need is 3 pieces of 4 by 6 inch fabric. To make the tissue holder you form it inside out, then sew around the outside and invert to have your Right Sides showing. This was really quick and looks way cuter than carry around a plastic stash of klennex. I plan to make a few more of these, likely one with the peacock fabric, and the others from different fabrics I have a good amount of. 

Completed holder, showing tissue inside :)

Completed Holder Closed

Once completing this little project (less than 15 minutes!) I decided to see if I could reverse engineer my coffee coaster from yesterday to use less material. The Riley Blake Design pattern for the coffee coaster/hot pads calls for 5 squares of equal size, one square is your backing, and then the other 4 are ironed in half, and when you sew it together and invert it only 1/2 of each fabric still shows... this lead me to wonder if you really needed the underside of fabric. So I took the corners that I had cut off my Christmas Tree Skirt and used the seam ripper to borrow the 1/2 triangle squares then I cut down the 5 inch corner square to the size of the 2 half triangles (because they were cut just over 1/4 inch they weren't a full 5 inches together). Once I had this done I laid the fabrics the same way requested by the original pattern, but I did Wrong Sides up so when I inverted the Right Sides would come through. The results were just ok. In the original design the middle points of the fabrics meet but aren't sewn together which looks fine, but with this there was a good amount of gap, so I took my hand at sewing a few extra lines in to hold down the middle better.  The coaster turned out to be usable, but I wouldn't do this for future coasters, the original way was better. 

What I consider the Top

Bottom of Coaster

Once this was complete I decided to go back to the original pattern;  I had 15 charm squares left from my Mr. Claus set I'd ordered for the Christmas Tree Skirt, so I ended up using them to create 3 more coasters to go with the one I completed last night. 

Complete Set, Fronts of Each. To get the centers to meet I ended up pinning them and then sewing the outer border. 

Two Fronts, Two Backs. The Merry Christmas Fabric is on the back of all 4, 2 are Red, 2 are Green. It was the only fabric that required it go a specific direction so I figured I'd match it. 

So far that's what I've done for the evening, I might try a few more things but we'll see. I'll be sure to update if I do!