Homemade Christmas

Every Christmas Eve, my family gathers with my sister's family, usually at our house.  We usually do a themed Christmas Eve dinner.  We save turkey and all the fixins for Christmas Day.

One of our first themed dinners was "My Big Fat Greek Christmas Eve".  The colours, blue and white, of course, the food ~ as authentic Greek as we could muster ~ my DH does a fabulous barbequed lamb roast; couple that with Greek lemon potatoes (one of my sister's specialties), my homemade baklava, spanakopita, etc. and you guessed it, we rolled ourselves away from the table after lots of great food and conversation and more often than not, some of DH's prize-winning wine.  These are memorable family times.

I usually give one family member a quilt for Christmas each year.  Last year my niece got a black and white and hot pink disappearing Nine-Patch which was very warmly received and to this day cherished (gives me a warm fuzzy feeling knowing my homemade gift blessed my kin).  I don't have any quilts for family members this year but I have issued a challenge to my rellies ~ 'we're going to have a homemade Christmas'. So far, my knitting daughter is on board (she had already starting knitting Christmas presents for her cousins); my wine-maker husband is on board; my musician son is on board, and me and my sewing machine are warming up to get down to business.

I love the idea of taking time (away from the mall) to think about using our giftings and talents to create something to give to someone else.  They don't have to be elaborate, professional productions.  I'm working on knitting socks for my DH and DS.  They are excited to receive them.  I love the feeling that I'm going to give them something I myself have made.  It's a great feeling.  The less time shopping the better as far as I'm concerned.

And as for the meal this year....Christmas in Tuscany.  I envision warm candlelight and my favourite people around my table enjoying our favourite Italian foods and in those quiet moments between bites and conversation, pondering the love that went in to our gifts to one another.  I imagine the expressions on their faces when they unwrap my gift from the heart.

I'm still formulating my gift ideas.  Tomorrow is November 1st which always seems to signal me to get busy cutting and sewing because those days on the calendar are closer than they appear.

Now I'm off to my stash to go shopping and see what I can find for these gifts.

Is it too soon to say Merry Christmas??

Until next time,
Mavis

Friday Night Sew-in and Sunday Night Project - Carolina Christmas

Friday Night Sew-in...was a bust.  I came home from work with a headache and was dizzy.  I opted to stay in bed and watch TV with my hubby and managed to ward off the flu.

Tonight, however, I'm working on my Carolina Christmas Mystery Quilt from last November (Quiltville).  inI'm very close to being able to my blocks together and am very excited!!  I will be doing the 'sashed' version of the quilt to break up the noise of my fabric.  I think this quilt will be for the queen bed in our Queen Suite of our B&B (the Christmas quilt).  I love Bonnie Hunter's quilts.

208 half square triangles in red and my neutral.  I'm half-way through them and hope to get them all done tonight and pressed.  They will form part of the broken dishes block.

Not sure what these are called but there are plenty of them and they will go with the first blocks to form what Bonnie calls the "Fox and Geese" blocks.  They end up being the 'stars' in the quilt.

These next blocks are called Poinsettia blocks.  Four of them go together into each block.  I love them!

I can't find Bonnie's finished Carolina Christmas quilt on her Quiltville website but here's what I'm planning to do for my layout.  I love this quilt!

This one was done by "Illa" from my yahoo group.  Just love it!  Isn't it wintery??  Mine won't be as white as this but if it looks this good I'll be happy!!  Well done Illa.

This weekend I'm also working on knitting socks and various and sundry projects.  It must be autumn!!  And since the socks are for my DH and my DS and were supposed to be gifts for last Christmas I should really finish them soon.  It helps that my DD has taken up knitting so we now love to sit together with a cup of tea and visit and knit together.  I love that.  And she's looking for me now so I will hang up my stylo for the evening and shut down my sewing machine and join my daughter for the remainder of the evening.

Until next time...so many projects, so little time!!

Mavis

My first quilted bag/purse!

I finally did it!  I made a quilted bag.  I found this as a kit down in Oregon when I was on the Sisters Bus Trip.  I cannot remember which quilting store had it but it had to be mine!

I love the fabric and it was a quick project.  I started cutting it out at noon with my quilt group and finished it up tonight after a few hours' break for grocery shopping, dinner, etc...AND I had to rip out a few stitches because the instructions weren't very clear for a first-timer.  The pattern is "Pocket Perfect" by Kathy Fernholz (Indygo Junction, Inc.)  

Creative Slump leads to deconstruction...

I haven't sewn a stitch since my Saturday sewing 2 weeks ago.  I've spent some time in my studio but more organizing than creative pursuits.  I've had a baby quilt on my design wall for weeks trying to decide how to fix it.  Today it was like a bad hair day.  I pulled out the scissors and chopped it up, salvaging the main squares and discarding the rest.  Here are the before and after shots:

BEFORE (I actually placed the squares back in the frames.  The blue border has already been cut off.  This is a reasonable representation of the 'before' picture.  Yuk!

Now, here's the blocks I salvaged:  (the 2" blue borders are in my 2" strip drawer; the balance of the 'flimsy' is in my bag of scraps that goes to the Win Thrift Store to be recycled into new fabric, so it's not really waste, right?)

Any ideas on what else I could do to finish this baby quilt?  I'm toying with framing them log cabin style but they already measure 9".

I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas about these blocks...

Until next time,

Mavis

Baby Bricks & Stepping Stones - UFO done! or IFFI!!

This quilt was created especially for a beautiful baby girl in our church congregation named Monroe.  She totally suits her name and I think this quilt totally suits her.

Baby Bricks & Stepping Stones

It is a free pattern from Bonnie Hunter's website:  www.quiltville.com called "Bricks and Stepping Stones".  It is very quick to put together.  I machine quilted on my friend's Little Gracie with a Janome 6600 and then did a machine binding using the faux piping tutorial at http://tlcstitches.blogspot.com/2010/07/faux-piped-binding-tutorial.html.

It will be presented to Monroe sometime mid-September along with some other presentations by other quilters in our church quilting group to the other babies born to families in our church...and there are many!

We're kinda behind in getting our quilts done so I'm very happy to have found time to finish this quilt this weekend and to have discovered this snazzy new binding method.  Thank you to Trish from Seattle for sharing this tutorial on her tlcstitches blog.

Until next time!
Mavis

Playtime!!

I am a fan of "Quilting Arts" on TV and the Web.  I usually tape the show and watch is Saturday mornings.  Last Saturday I did just that and was so inspired by one of their projects that I bought some dissolvable paper and created this portrait of my dog, Sara, Saturday afternoon.

I loved this project!  I will use a lighter background next time because it's not easy to see Sara, but my whole family recognized her right off the batt so I must have done something right.  There are some more advanced doggy portraits on the downloadable .pdf on the website.  You have to register on the site to download the document but it only takes a few minutes.

You can check out this project at http://www.quiltingartstv.com/projects/600/projects_600_9.htm. It's Project 609-1.

Supplies Needed:  Scrap of batting 8.5 x 11"; Scraps of fabric (batiks work great), all in analogous colours; Temporary adhesive spray; dissolvable paper/stabilizer (I used Sulky brand); image to print on injet printer.

The directions are on the Quilting Arts website.  This was so much fun!  It gave me lots of ideas about other applications of this design.  I hope it inspires you too!

Blessings,
Mavis

Strawberry Fields Forever - the photo!

Argghhhh...I bought my daughter's laptop with the dreaded Windows Vista on it.  I'm trying hard to upload the photo of the quilt...let's give it another whirl....

Ta da!!  Off to make the label now...

Until next time...
Mavis