Finished Project: Christmas Tree Skirt!

 Tuesdays I work late so I always spend the first hour of the day doing laundry and watching the latest episode of the amazing race. Once I had both those tasks in motion I got back to working on the tree skirt. I had my binding complete from last night, so the first order of business was to cut the opening in the tree skirt and then pin the binding so it could be attached.

Cutting the opening was a bit scary but instead of going circular like the video I chose a square opening. I think it looks nicer and I figured it'd be easier to bind.

As I shared a few days back in regard to binding, I'm about speed and efficiency so machine binding is all I'm currently interested in. I watched a great tutorial on Riley Blake Designs website on how to machine bind and decided to try their method. Instead of binding from on top and them matching the seams to the bottom, this method had me attaching the binding to the bottom and rolling it to the top and sewing from the top, where you could see what was and was not getting sewn. Way smart.

Let me tell you the cutout was literally the hardest part to bind. One because there was no excess batting to need to cover so you have some more fabric to bring over than you do else where and two because the corners were so short it was hard to miter them.

I got the whole skirt bottom binding attached then flipped it to the front to begin pinning so I could see it to the top. When I got to the cutout I decided it wasn't working, it just seemed like to much fabric so I got out the seam ripper and took it apart. Then I re-positioned and sewed it again, well I ended up sewing it the same way, but when I was done this time I got it to be more manageable and was able to pin it in a way I liked.

I finally went at sewing the top binding on and thankfully it almost completely turned out as I had anticipated! Woo! Especially because I was at this point 15 minutes before I needed to leave for work! I took it to the living room so I could lay it flat and take photos and only found two areas where I'll need to go back and rip the seam and resew but thankfully thy were small areas!!

So happy to have this second project complete and cannot wait to use it on our tree!

*** UPDATE*** Now that I'm home from work I seam ripped the three areas that needed attention and resewed them, they look beautiful! I also now have the skirt under our tree (pictures below!)

Cutting the opening for the tree. Scary but manageable. 

Completed Skirt, I love the the middle closes on it's own so you don't have to tie it shut.

Completed Skirt, showing off the opening. 

Showing front and back fabrics. The backing fabric is cute so I might  reverse this every couple of days so I can enjoy both sides!

Completed Skirt looking at it head on. The opening is on the right side as the backing fabric and some of the Merry Christmas Fabrics on the front side are one directional.

The Reverse of the Tree Skirt!

Closeup of Cutout Binding

Closeup of Front and Back Binding

Completed Skirt Serving Its Purpose! 

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!

10 Minute project!

Quilted coaster! So easy to make, take 5 charms, iron 4 in half, stack on top of batting, sew around all corners, clip corners, turn inside out, and sew new border and tada you're done!!

Learned it from Riley Blake Designs Website Tutorials, you can find it here.

Front Side

Back Side

Quick and Easy

Last night I started attempted to take my original log cabin block (see below) and turn it into a hot pad. I cut the backing and batting, pinned the layers together, quilted the areas desired, and then cut and ironed the binding. Pretty good for a quick turn around if you ask me! 

 Below are pictures of the project in action!

Original Log Cabin Block

During Quilting/Binding Process. Added the batting/backing, and pins, this point I had completed the machine quilting. I did the stitch in the ditch which turned out pretty well! 

Quilted Edges using Stitch 23

Quilted Edges Closeup, White thread for the Navy, and Multi-Color for the Red/Green

 All that I had to do today when I arrive home was finish pinning the binding and then sew it on. Even though I knew machine binding is not the cleanest way to go I decided to attempt it again. This time I knew going in that I would want to cut my excess binding and backing down to just a 1/4 inch to ensure I'd have enough room to fold the binding from front to back properly. I rewatched the Missouri Quilts video on how to bind a quilt and stole their trick for making the edges look nice. Funny thing is I had no problem pinning and sewing it on two corners but the other two corners made me totally confused and I eventually got them pinned but when I sew them I accidentally sewed them shut and had to use my seam ripper to release them in the end. Thankfully you can't see those mistakes in the finished product but crazy how you can easily do something and then the next time you try it you can totally mess it up. 

Ta Da: The Finished Hot Pad

If you're wondering why none of my photos of table toppers or hot pads are on my table, its because the table has been taken over by fabric, sewing machine, cutting mat, and so much more! 

Completed Front Side and Completed Back Side of Hot Pad

Closeup of Binding, Quilting, and Top/Back

Matching Hot Pad and Table Runner! 

After finishing these projects I decided to just make a fun block that could potentially be used later or if not I figured maybe it could be a hot pad. Using the Peacock Fabric and the 3 types of pink/mauve that I had I took the Bridle block from week one and made it my own. Here is the result:

Instead of having 4 sets of the outer most corners in the middle nested together I decided to just emphasize the pretty peacock fabric and put it in the middle as an accent.

Completing the Table Runner

I really don't enjoy unfinished works, so as soon as I got home from work I got to working on my binding. After rewatching the video from Ehow.com on Machine Binding, I went to work pinning my binding to the table topper. Pinning the binding was the easy part. Once I had it pinned down I had to attempt to sew it on perfectly with the 1/4 inch seam allowance, the pins really helped me get this correct. There is only one part that you'll find on the finished table topper where I couldn't get the binding in the right place on the top side (Which was annoying but hey it's my first project).

After I got the binding attached by machine, I cut down the excess batting and backing to a half inch, as the youtube video stated. I had to trim it down a bit more in a few places because of a few small inconsistencies in my 1/4 inch seam but overall this was pretty easy with the rotary cutter. 

Once I had it cut down I unpinned the binding and started folding it over to the back side. The goal is to have the binding tuck into the back side so that if you go over your first binding stitch it will attach the back binding in the same place and look almost seamless. In about 45% of the quilt I would say this happened... the other parts--- well let's just say thank goodness this isn't a reversible table topper. Although there were some parts where it didn't go in as well as I would have liked it looks very nice on the top. If I were to do it over I might consider hand stitching as you have more control but this was WAY fast and it made me happy to finally have a finished piece of work! 

Here are photos of the finished product:

Finished Product!

Close up of Backing, binding, and quilt top. 

Split View of Left and Right Side

Completed back and binding 

Now that this project is complete I'm going to go back and make a hot pad out of my 10 inch log cabin block I made. I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow! 

Original Log Cabin

Shopping for Materials

Today I spent the morning organizing my quilting area and researching what type of finishing items I'd need to buy to complete my table runner. While on my lunch break at work I headed to Joann Fabric to pick up a dark blue fabric to use as backing for my table runner and then some batting. While there I felt a bit overwhelmed in trying to find a matching backing, so I just chose a plain dark blue instead of trying to match any of the patterns already in the table runner. The nice thing about this was the fabric was $3.99 a yard, and I had a 50% off coupon via the Joann's Iphone App (a must have!). With the help of the cutting station service attendant I was able to find some insul-bright batting which is made for going in "hot-pads and oven mitts". This was on sale for $6.99 a yard from $7.99 (Wish it had been normal price because I would have been able to use my 50% coupon on it if it was regular price!).  I picked up a spool of thread there too as I have already gone through one spool with all my practicing!

1 Yard Backing, 1 Yard Batting, 1 Spool Thread ($11.69)

After I gathered all these goods I watched two very quick youtube videos about how to add batting/backing to a table runner but I didn't feel confident I could do it on my own on my first try. So I reached out to my great Quilting 101 instructor, she host classes at her house Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday nights where you can bring your projects and she'll assist you in completing them. What a great deal right?! I sent a photo of the runner thus far and she said she could help, so I'm excited to get this finished tomorrow :) Can't wait to show the results.

Day One, Week Two: Table Runner Project

Wow! I've made it one week, seven whole days since I have begun quilting and I feel like I'm getting the hang of this! 

Today I decided to see if I could find a Christmas Tree Skirt Quilt project, I found a really cute one from the Missouri Quilt Company, which they have YouTube Video for how to make. I watched the video and thought I can make this, so I headed to their site and found they were still having a great Cyber Monday sale, in addition their always $5 flat shipping. For the skirt you need to have 2 Charm Packs (a pack that comes with about 40-42 5" squares of different fabrics bundled for you!) and a border and backing fabric. I purchased all three of those items plus the deal of the day (a charm pack of fruits/veggies prints for 75 cents!), and a marking pin that erases with the heat of the iron all for $35. That order should be here by next week, so I think it will be my week 3 project. 

For my week two project I settled on a Holiday Table Runner pattern I found on McCall's website. Now sure the pattern says it's for Halloween and you need 9 types of fabric, but I knew I could do it with 5 fabrics and in a Christmas/Winter motif. For the table runner instead of each border being different I alternated the outer 4 borders, and had a unique border in the middle surrounding the center square. The challenge with the table runner was it got large fast and was not the easiest to sew. 

Two things that came in handy though: 
1.) The extended table on my sewing machine. I added the extra legs and that helped keep the part of the fabric I wasn't sewing up and out of the way. 
2.) Pinning the strips. Everyone who I watch in YouTube Videos who have been quilting for a while say pinning isn't always necessary and they hate it. Thankfully my quilting instructor had agreed with this sentiment but still made me learn to pin anyways. I used those pinning skills to make sure all my patches lined up properly. 

Here is what the completely sewn together table runner looked like just off the sewing machine:

Top View, notice there are triangles at the end of each row. We take care of those in the next step.

Closeup so you can see the fabrics and hopefully my decent sewing efforts :)

Once all my strips were sewn (ps if I'm using the wrong kind of "sewn" please let me know!) on I  had to cut the table runner down to the right size. Scary! So the cutting instructions said to leave 7.25 inches from the middle of the silver squares, the problem is my table runner is twice the length of my cutting pad so I had to do it in 4 cuts. Thankfully math again came into save the day and I was able to keep everything straight.  Here is where I left off at the end of the night with the table runner. 

Cut to Size! Full Length View. (Would have put it on the table but that's where all my quilting stuff resides.)

Cute Fabrics Right? Who Needs 9 Different patterns!

After I finished sewing the last strips and cutting I had to retire for the evening, but there is definitely more to come on this as I plan to make this my first finished project. Meaning, I better find a video on how to add batting, a border, and "stitch in the ditch!"