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!

Who needs Black Friday when you have Goodwill!

Today I returned from Northern Arizona back to my house and had a few hours to work on quilting and getting laundry done. Before I decided what I wanted to work on I decided I would check out Goodwill to see if they had more fabric in. When I was there on Tuesday, the cashier said they get fabric and patterns all the time... and surely enough that was the truth! 

When I got to the area they sell fabric in there were many bags of mismatched fabrics. There are a few down falls with shopping this way: 1.) You can't touch the fabric 2.) You don't know how much of each fabric you're getting and 3.) If it's an ugly fabric they have a lot of they put it in multiple bags hoping to get rid of it! The good thing is, the positives outweigh the negatives. I picked up six bags of fabric ranging in price from 69 cents to 99 cents and when I rang up I only paid $4.84 (some bags were on sale!). Below is a picture of all the fabrics I got: 

Starting from Upper Left: Purple Hat Society Fabric, Paisley Flowers, Mauve, Light Pink, Red with Colorful Hearts (A LOT of this), Yellow and White Moon and Stars, 1/2 a purple bandanna,  about 20 10"x10" silver squares that once ironed and trimmed are beautiful. From Bottom Left: Small Blue/White Flower print, Medium Blue/Green Flower Print, Light Blue Solid, Pink Solid, and then two dark blue solids and a silver solid. (Dark blues and silvers are not cotton so I won't be using, but I'll get them to someone who can use them.)

After sorting and ironing this lot of fabric I decided to give the Simplified Lover's Knot pattern from the old quilting book a shot. The directions were not the most simple to me because they gave you the information on how to make the blocks as if you were making an entire quilt. So instead of saying for block one you need two strips of this and one of this, it told me I needed 16 strips of this and 24 of another. After doing some math I was able to break down the pattern and put it together. The nice thing about this is it is like the Split Rail or the 9 Square Block, you take two fabrics and alternate the colors and sew together so you have a light, dark, light panel, and then a dark, light, dark panel. Once you have those done you just cut strips to size, match seams, and begin to sew again. 

Lover's Knot Block

As you can tell I used a very light blue and a semi-light blue for this block. The very light blue is pretty sheer so I may not use it again unless it's in small doses. Not everything ended up matching up and I think this is partly due to the fact that both fabrics like to stretch a little. Overall not my favorite, but would like to try again with different fabric because a completed quilt with this as all of the blocks would be lovely. 

After making this block I decided to practice sewing the 9 square patches again and matching corners so I cut up one of the silver 10 by 10 squares, and took some scrap peacock fabric  and some of the new bright pink to put the mini-blocks below together. Since the size was kind of weird I couldn't figure out how to put them all together where they would look good, so for now they're just 4 separate mini-blocks.

Day Five

This morning I decided to wake up at a decent hour (about 9am) and pick out a block to quilt and try to complete it by the afternoon. The reason for this is I know I won't have a chance to quilt tomorrow, so I wanted to be sure to get at least a little practice in before I started the day. 

I went to McCall's website and found the Chinese Coin Block. I decided do try my hand at this because it was similar to the Bridle Block (day 3), but it had a fun outside border, and only used three colors which was a perfect way to start using my peacock fabric! 

Because the pattern called for me to cut squares and strips I had to start with my large pieces of fabric and get them broken down into something I could cut on my 18 by 24" cutting mat. Once I had the fabrics broken down and ironed I set to cutting my squares out. There were quite a few smaller pieces for this one so I ended doing a lot of sewing. I've really gotten much better at matching my seams when adding rows together, makes me happy! The only part I struggled with on this one was my Half Square Triangles (HST). The HST in the pattern were 3 7/8" by 3 7/8", I knew from my 101 class that I should give myself that extra 1/8th inch and just go 4 by 4. This was helpful but I didn't cut my material as straight as I thought because when I was squaring up (cutting the HST's down to the required 3.5" size post sew), my edges weren't straight. This meant that when I finally combined everything together my 1/4" seam allowance on the HST triangle that connects to the Pastel in Row 2 on the Left side, the fabrics meet but aren't actually sown together for about 1/2 an inch. Oops! I didn't want to make a new HST, so I just went with it. If I decide someday to use this in a quilt or make something out of it I will rip the seams and fix it, but until that day-- this is practice. :) 

Completed Chinese Coin-- What do you think of the Peacock Fabric? I love it!!