Christmas card wall hangings

My mother in law in the UK started making us homemade Christmas cards five years ago.  She personalises them with photos I've randomly sent her throughout the year.  You can never be certain which ones she'll choose!  I didn't want the cards sitting in the cupboard so I've been turning them into simple wall hangings and now we get to enjoy them every Christmas.

Here's one of the cards.  My husband and I are in the kangaroos pouch.  It's a picture of us eating ice-cream!

 

I pull it all apart and trim to a useable size.  This one was a bit tricky because my MIL trimmed the corners but they ended up inside my seam allowance so it worked out.  I added a two inch border, some hanging tabs and joined it to another card.

Here it is with this year's card.  My husband and I hanging on the tree with our grandchildren!  I need to buy another hanger some time.

Here's the one I made before.  Our first card was the caravan one because we'd recently bought a van and were just starting out on our camping adventures. I think I should have pressed the hanging before taking the picture!  

Hopefully we'll get many more of these lovely pieces of artwork/memories.

Happy New Year!

 I'm off to a great start to my New Year!  Ha ha ha!  But still, at least I'm working on something!

Santa sacks

My daughter, Nicky, has recently moved into a new house and needed Christmas items so I decided to make her family Santa sacks. I found this lovely red and cream fabric range at Spotlight fairly inexpensively.

When I laid out my first piece of fabric for cutting I noticed it had cuts in it!  I was very disappointed and I was worried about the other fabrics but it turned out to just be on this piece. As I was making this pattern up as I went I cut around the cuts in the fabric and that was how I determined what size the bags would be.

These are basic lined drawstring bags.  I wanted them lined because I like the tidy look.  Once I stitched the lining and the front together I had to work out where to do the string channel.  I originally decided to do the channel 5 inches or so from the top of the bag and although I would have liked the look it's a waste of space inside the bag.  This needed to go near the top edge for maximum toy storage!

I then started making the string for the bags with leftover lining fabric.  I have these nifty turn through tools which make it easy but in the end I thought it was way too much work so I bought extra long shoe laces.

Which I tea stained!

I embroidered all the names.  This one is for another family I didn't get around to making bags for in the end.  But there's always next year ha ha!

I wanted the name tags to look like luggage tags.  I put the embroidered side and a patterned fabric right sides together and stitched them leaving a hole for turning.  When I went to turn them one of them didn't look quite like the others!  Oops!  Because I'd trimmed the corners I had to carefully resew that one.

And here is a finished bag.  I inserted the end of the laces through a buttonhole in the luggage tag.  

Four bags ready for labels.

I decided to fill one to see what it would look like.  I put a rolled up single doona (duvet/comforter) inside and there's plenty of space left in it so I'm really happy with the size!  I put it next to my fireplace to photograph and captured Minnie in the glass!

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care

But I’m in no rush for St. Nicholas to be here!

We came to Australia with very few belongings and as our house in the UK hadn't sold yet we had very little money.  We moved into a rental property and shortly afterwards one of our neighbours posted a note in the mailbox advising us that the neighbourhood we'd just moved into went all out for Christmas and drew large crowds.  We had no money and no furniture but we had to decorate for Christmas?!!  In the end we bought a fake Christmas tree, threw some lights on it and sat it in the curtain less window for the crowds to "admire".  I also bought several metres of red, green and cream polycotton and made us all very basic stockings.

I replaced those six stockings when I wanted to do something to use up my scraps and orphan blocks and, over the years as the family has grown (or decreased!) I've added more stockings.  As I hung all eleven stockings yesterday my first thought was that I'm going to need a bigger fireplace in future!

I try to make each stocking different.  I guess the joy of quilting means that I'll never run out of ideas at least!  I decided that the latest two stockings would be a PLUS style and a hexagon style.  I thought that the plus design would be easier than it turned out to be.  My brain really struggled to work out what went where but it won't put me off making a plus quilt one day!

I carefully laid out the hexagon shapes and took lots of photos for reference but I still managed to sew them in the wrong orders!  

Hand stitching hexagons probably wasn't the most sensible idea to do with a dodgy hand!

I had to keep checking that I'd sewn enough hexagons to fit my pattern template.

I finished the stocking fronts and quilted them simply and then sewed them to make the finished stockings.  It's at this point when you've sewn it all together and are just about to turn through that you start to worry that you may have sewn everything in the wrong order and you'll end up with the hanger or the cuff inside the lining.  But. PHEW, I did it right.

I had a couple of helpers while I was sewing.  These beautiful greys are my dog, Minnie, and our Christmas foster, Hugh.

I also started embroidering a gift.

And framed it inside an embroidery hoop.  It's been a while since I use a hoop to frame and I messed it up several times but I got there in the end.

I'm currently working on some Santa sacks.  Let's hope I finish them before Santa starts making his way down the chimney!

It’s been a while!

In my last post I was talking about going to retreat. That lovely weekend ago seems like years ago now!  After showing you my poorly displayed shirt challenge quilts I decided that I should take some quilts to The Retreat so I could put them on the beds there at Abbe’s tidy, lovely house.  Judy and I arrived first so we could do this without inconveniencing the other retreat ladies and Judy ended up doing most of the work.  I just took the pictures!

I had a fantastic time and just pottered a bit with my sewing but that was fine.  After taking all the quilts on the beds pictures I didn’t think to take any more of what everyone was up to!  I came home and looked at my photos and couldn’t believe what I’d taken!

Here is the picture I took to send to Kay to show her what she was missing out on by not being there.  It’s a delicious German potato salad I plan on making again.  And again.  You can find the recipe here

And for some reason the only other picture I took was of Gail kneeling on her quilt! The quilt on display on the wall and the cushions were made by Abbe, the owner of the retreat.

I’m just going to show you one of the quilts I brought to take pictures of or this will be a very long post. Here’s Judy working hard to perfectly drape and smooth my quilt on one of the beds in the master bedroom.

This quilt was a kit I bought from Connecting Threads that I called my retreat quilt because I only worked on it at retreat.  Several retreats, in fact!  I bought the kit with Christmas or birthday money from relatives in the UK as it’s an almost instant way of saying “Look what you bought me!”.  Far better than not spending the gift and it going towards paying the power bill!

I quilted this one on my small quilting frame using The Grace Quilting Company’s Plastic pattern perfect which was a lot of work but I loved how it ended up.

I’ve had a bit of success with fixing my hand injury this week so I’ve been thinking more and more about sewing again and have been working on some Christmas projects that I hope to have finished very soon.  And, of course, I have the other displayed finished quilts to show you so you should be hearing from me very soon!

I’ve been sewing!

My sewing room is no longer empty.  Or tidy woo!  I started by pulling out the star blocks I’d worked on at my last retreat.

It’s amazing how quickly you can forget what you’re doing when you’ve put your project away for a bit!  On the plus side though, it does feel like you’re starting a new project!

I’d also forgotten how to make HSTs!!  I marked my little squares and realised that if I sewed them it would be wrong but I couldn’t work out how to make them right!  

But I did work it out and felt a bit sheepish once I had.  Not as sheepish as I felt later though when I found all the squares already marked in a different box! 

Here I am trying to sew with my hand jewellery.  I’m finding it impossible to use pins so this quilt is definitely not going to have perfect points!

I’ve now made five and I have my next two blocks arranged and sat next to my machine ready to go.

This is one of my bonus pinwheel blocks.  This is probably the best example of the worst sewing.  Before hurting my hand I would have unpicked it but I’ve decided to let it go.  It’s the best I can do now and that’s got to be good enough.  

I’m off to retreat again next week.  I’m so excited!  Hopefully I’ll get some sewing done this time!  Still, sometimes it’s just great to hang out with lovely friends even if you don’t get a lot done.

A dream? Or a nightmare?

 I’m wearing this mighty fine hand jewellery now.  It’s definitely less torturous than the previous device to try to fix my hand but I still can’t sew.  It’s very bad timing to start writing a quilting blog when I can’t do any quilting!

After my son’s 21 birthday party where he’d taken over my sewing room I had the carpets cleaned and I repainted the walls to freshen them up.  I’ve just put my machine and cutting table back in.  The room either looks very depressing and empty or fantastic and ready to fill depending on how you want to look at it!  Look at that clean and empty cutting board!  And my design wall is naked!!

I know some people would look at that picture and think it looks wonderful but it just looks so wrong to me ha ha!