Christmas Vintage Holiday Quilt

This post is a little photo heavy! 

So here it is my vintage holiday quilt, all finished.

Perfect for snuggling with the family.

 

I started cutting out the blocks for this quilt on December 4th and finished it completely including having it quilted and had the binding sewed on Sunday 15 December.

 

A great way to end the year, with the finish of this Christmas Quilt.AND LOOK AT THE BACK

I love how this was quilted, the perfect pattern for christmas.  It really stands out well on the back, so here is the photo before it gets covered in labrador dog hairs!  I don't think it will ever look so hairless again!  Fleece is a magnet for dog hairs!

Pouch for a friend

I also managed to sew a simple pouch for a friend this weekend.  Now if only I could post a picture on here, you would not believe the resemblance!

A FINISH

So the other day I showed you the first of many blocks I have made for my Christmas quilt. 
Well I decided I couldn’t hold out any longer and wanted to share it with you all.  I finished my quilt.
So here it is before the quilting, I am pretty excited and happy about it, apart from one mistake which I didn’t notice until it was too late too fix, but I am going with the “its handmade” and only my second finished quilt,

 

Linking up to over at Freshly pieced.

 

I sent it to Sue my long arm quilter on Tuesday and I got it back on Thursday!. I still cant believe she could fit me in at such a busy time of the year! She is a star.
I didn’t buy binding for it when I bought the kit and after seeing it quilted I just had to buy coordinating fabric, so on Friday I went to the quilt shop that I originally bought the kit from, which is an hours drive away and got my binding fabric. Then on Friday evening I cut and sewed on the binding front and spent Saturday hand sewing the binding onto the back. I will post photos of the finished quilt when I get that post written up.

WIP Vintage holiday–Block Number 1

 

Its been a little while since my last post but there has been a lot going on here.  My son turned 18 yesterday and Christmas is not far away so I have been a little bit too busy to blog.  I have also been busy with a new project and here is a  sneak peak of what I have been working on…………….

On the way back from the quilting retreat  I went to on the weekend before thanksgiving we stopped off at a quilt shop. They were having a store wide sale, it would have been rude of me to ignore this fact, so I bought a few things!

One of the things that I could not resist was the Vintage Holiday  Quilt Kit.  One of the ladies at the retreat was in the process of making this quilt.  To my surprise they had it at the quilt shop in kit form so I had to buy it. Last week I decide that I was going to start making this quilt hoping that I might get part way there to finishing it for next Christmas.  I got it out on Monday night and started cutting my fabric up.

So here is the first block, sorry about the iPhone pics but I did not have my camera on hand and light was not that great.

 

These blocks are so much fun to make.

WIP– A good week 3 projects completed

I have had another productive week this week

Today was the last day for sending off my package for the Modern Scrappy Bits Swap. As well as scraps participants are asked to send a handmade item.  I decided to make my partner a pouch, I love pouches, who doesn’t? I think you can’t go wrong with a pouch.  So here it is. 

The grey fabric is Kona in Charcoal, but looks blue in the above photo, its more like the photo below only a little bit darker! I was in a rush to get this in the mail so didn’t have time to take decent photos!

I made a little father Christmas tag with the fabric left over from my Christmas table runner, and in the orange tissue paper are some fabric scraps, including some Kate Spain, Moda and a few other nice pieces. I also included a little sewing holder which is the thing under the tag. I hope my partner likes this little package.

I received my swap yesterday and this is what I received. It’s a pot holder

 

and these are the scraps I received!

I managed to get my  Star Table Runner –  Completed!!

And one more photo, as the sun begins to rise!!!! I love this photo! Yes it was a little bit early to be taking photos of table runners in freezing cold weather, wearing my dressing gown!!!

 

3x6 Bee Blocks –Another block made! Its too dark for photos so I will post photos next week.

Knitting = I finished another Scarf.

working on some other blocks that I will post about at the weekend.

 

 

 

 

Linking up to over at Freshly pieced.

WIP Wednesday

I have had a pretty productive week, nothing completed but lots of progress!

So in progress and nearly completed are

Star Table Runner – Nearly finished, I am still deciding on what to do in the borders, it will be some sort of straight line quilting I just cant decide what.

3x6 Bee Blocks – I made a start on a couple more of these the other day  but ran out of white to finish them off, so all they needed to finish was a white border, I managed to get some more fabric yesterday and this evening I I got one done and the other one I cut the borders the wrong width so have to unpick and start again.  So 2 completely finished and one half done! 4 more to go…….

Swap – I am still playing around with ideas in my head on what to make for my swap partner!  I think I will make a pouch.I had a go at quilt as you go but messed it up, so back to the drawing board!

Knitting = One scarf still in progress

 

Linking up to over at Freshly pieced.

Pompom Scarf

 

More knitting this time with some Pompom yarn.  This was even easier than the ruffled scarves I made.  They are much shorter though, so next time I will be using 2 balls of yarn.

This is me trying to take a photo, you can see how short it is. Its approximately 35 inches and I really like my scarf to be a bit longer, but this will work underneath a jacket.

Again same scarf, I had a hard time trying to take decent photos today.

STOLEN

OMG I just got an email from someone who seemed extremely pleased with themselves!!!!
ditman has left a new comment on your post "Union Jack No2 - Right way round and traditional c...":
Hey there! I've just found this post looking for union jack flags on Google!
I used your design for an iPhone case I did for my girlfriend, check it out!
http://twitpic.com/bh2cby/full
Regards and thanks for posting such a beautiful piece of work!
So I went and checked it out, only to find that he has used my picture.  Now if he had sent me an email asking then I would probably been happy to let him use it, however he didn’t and not only that I do have a copyright notice all over my blog and have since 2007!!! so annoying

this is the picture that he used of mine, which I have now splashed a big watermark on

and this is what he did with it, its lovely but……………………………….. UPDATE

I sent him an email but as yet no reply, I doubt I will get one BUT come on world!
So just incase he reads this, I know his name, where he works and he is from Spain, what am i hoping to gain from this?  I guess an apology or something!!!!  He has until tomorrow or I am going to name and shame on this blog!

Update apology received and photos removed.

WIP and Scrappy Swap Parcel Received

 

Another thing I made while on my quilting retreat was this table runner.  I had a lot of fun with this one and conquered one of my quilting fears.  I have never sewn half square triangles before, but I had a lot of fun doing this. The runner is made up of 3 blocks of the star and  I made a rough sketch of how I wanted this table runner to look and it worked out exactly how I had drawn it on graph paper.  I am pretty pleased with myself. 

I have already started quilting the stars, but I am a little bit lost on how to do the border, any ideas?  I did have a go at free motion quilting on a scrap bit of fabric, and all I can say is it was an absolute complete disaster, so I will not be doing any free motion quilting!  I think I will need to take a class! so if anyone has any suggestions then please let me know.

Yesterday  I checked the mail and was pleasantly surprised to find that my swap package had arrived from Cindy who blogs over at Adventures of the Singing Quilter .  I had seen the pouch she sent me on Flickr and had instantly secretly wanted it to be mine, but never thought for one minute it would be.  I absolutely love it and I also received as my local item a  beautiful handmade tag and also a fat quarter.  The scraps Cindy set are all gorgeous too.  I am one lucky swap partner.

Christmas Table Runner

Last weekend I was lucky enough to go on a quilting/sewing retreat with a group of 15 other woman.

I stayed here

OMGosh I cannot tell you how much fun and what a fantastic time I had, it was a seriously needed break for me. 

I managed to make a couple of things in between the eating and laughing, there was some sewing done. 

So for this post I just wanted to share the completed table runner I made. 

I did some straight line quilting on the centre panel and in the borders I stitched in the ditch.

Knitting

 

A couple of weeks ago I went to Michaels and I ended up in the yarn section, there were some really fun yarns and I came across a sample of knitted yarn by Red Heart Yarns called Sashay.  I am not sure if you have seen the ruffled scarves around blog land but these scarves are gorgeous. 

This is the first scarf I knitted using colour 1934 Rumba

 

Now if the truth be told I am not the worlds best knitter and I also have not knitted anything since my youngest child was born which is over 16 years ago now!!!  But I love the sample in Michaels so much I decided to give it a go.  Talk about easy, if you can cast on and knit and then cast off you can make one of these scarves it really is that simple.  There are plenty of YouTube videos showing you how to knit this particular yarn as its not like normal yarn!

The yarn was on sale at Michaels for $3.99 and I also saw it being sold in Wal-Mart for $4.67.  And I have seen these knitted scarves being sold for $20+, so if you want to save yourself some money then get those knitting needles out.

The first scarf knitted together so quickly I made another one! This was knitted with colour 1946 Ballet.

TIPS

1.So you don’t start off with it wider at the bottom of one end of the scarf than the other, you want to only cast on 3 stitches then knit the row and then increase by one stich each row until you have 6.  This isn’t really necessary but it means that it matches the cast off end better when finishing the scarf.  My first scarf where I cast on 6 stitches at the beginning looks much wider than the cast off end but isn’t really noticeable by anyone but me.

2.To get a good ruffle effect for the particular scarf you want to knit into every 2nd or even 3rd space at the edge of the yarn. (The pattern doesn’t mention this.) If you knit into each space, you’ll end up with a spiral scarf and no ruffles! I found this out pretty earlier on when it didn’t look like ruffles at al, so then decided to mix it up with sometimes knitting into each 2nd hole and then into the 3rd hole, and then two 3rd holes and then two 2nd holes, it really doesn’t matter which order it just means your making ruffles.

And if I confused you even more, leave me a comment and I can try and explain it a little better.

Sewing up a storm

 

I have been sewing up a storm the last few days.  I finished the needle book for my swap partner in the  Scrappy Swap over on Flickr hosted by Kat.

I had a really difficult time deciding on fabric for my partner.  I can’t really share what info I did have as that would give the game away.  I just hope she likes it

.

Fabric used :

Sandy Klop American Jane Yellow Pez fabric from the Peas and Carrots line.

Robert Kaufman Fabric by Laurie Wisbrun, Tufted Tweets, red, Birds on a wire

Konna in charcoal

Miscellaneous orange fabric

I also signed up for a quilting bee on Flickr and I am in the hexie hive.  So our blocks obviously includes hexagons so I have been working on them too.

I just cant decide on how to add the hexagons, either together or apart.  What do you think? and my other question (if anyone is reading this) is, what do you think is the best way to attach them, I can hand sew them on but I am not brilliant at applique! or I could use my machine but how??????

 

Fabric used :

Sandy Klop American Jane Yellow Pez fabric from the Peas and Carrots line

 

Oh and did I mention I singed up for another small swap on Flickr tonight!!! Yes, I have an addiction!