Log cabin Christmas: upgrade

In September, I posted about tending to some odds and ends with respect to my finished quilts. This little Christmas wall hanging is the last one that needed attention.

Made in 1999 with plaids, stripes, checks, dots, buttons and jumbo rick rack, this project was featured in a country craft magazine at a time when I was brand new to quilting.

Because it was small, (26″ x 26″) it looked like something I could manage as a beginner. I used whatever fabric I had on hand but did have fun shopping for the buttons. On a visit to our house that year, my mom showed me how to incorporate the rick rack in the border.

Years later, I realized that the project was insufficiently quilted and would never survive the washing machine. The stitches holding the buttons weren’t enough,

nor was the hand quilting in the center square.

So, for the first task, I turned to my default option and ditch quilted it.

The second task was to add a label.

The last task was upgrading the thread loops that hold the dowel rod used to hang the quilt. This project cannot have a hanging sleeve because it would cover the area across the top where buttons are attached.

If a button ever came off, the hanging sleeve would have to be removed to sew the button back on.

The original loops were a double strand of 50-weight cotton thread and were beginning to show signs of wear. I removed and replaced them with a single strand of Perle cotton #5.

The only task remaining belongs to John. He said he would sand and clear coat the dowel rod so that it would not snag the thread loops on the back.

Happy New Year!

Ribbon ornaments

I dug into my ribbon stash to make this year’s Christmas ornaments. A 7/8-inch, two-toned red ribbon was used to make these pretty poinsettia ornaments.

A decorative button with an antique gold finish from my grandmother was stitched to each center.

Next, I made these origami ornaments, and honestly, they were way more trouble than they were worth, with the fuss factor exceeding 11. I won’t discard them, but they are seriously underwhelming, given the effort.

The instructions for these ornaments were in the book Quick and Easy Ways with Ribbon by Ceci Johnson – well, quick and easy except for the ones on page 44.

I ended up making a paper template to sort out the details and minimize destruction of perfectly good ribbon.

The ornament features a pair of two-inch box pleats (the beginning of all the fussing since most ribbon is polyester and does not hold a crease well). The pleats are secured with a stitching line down the center.

A hanging loop is added, followed by stitching the short ends together. The ornament is then turned right side out and the pleat edges are tacked at the center with two small hand stitches.

The last ornament I made was a woven ribbon wreath. 

This project calls for ribbon that is the same on both sides. Most of the internet demos used ⅛-inch wide ribbon, requiring about two yards. My ribbon was ⅜ inches wide and required four yards for the circle. I like how it turned out, but I’m not sure it’s done. I’m thinking about adding a small bow at the top. More importantly, I might brush some needlework stiffener onto the back so that it holds its shape better.

Thanks for stopping by. Merry Christmas!

One more for the tree

In the annual quest to clear out my Christmas stitching projects drawer, this year, I managed to finish this little Mill Hill beaded stocking ornament.

Merry Christmas, all!

Year-end finishes

With one day to spare, I am sooooooo happy to say that I accomplished my goal to have all 30 vintage tree blocks done by the end of the year!

Throughout block construction, I’ve been struggling to come up with a layout beyond the standard on-point-with-sashing-and-cornerstones variety. After all this time, nothing had come to mind until a few days ago when it occurred to me that maybe a pieced border would be the solution I was looking for. I plugged the idea into EQ and it was perfect – lots of work, but perfect.

I also combed through my stash and found the perfect fabric for the alternate squares and setting triangles. It’s a homespun plaid and fortunately, there was more than enough to work with. I had considered unbleached muslin, but the effect was underwhelming. The homespun worked because it provided great contrast for the tree blocks.

Earlier this month, I finished these cute little felt ornaments for the Christmas tree:

And finally, a piece of my stitching past came back to me when we received my dad’s Christmas gift.

Tucked into the package was this, cut from the corner of a flour sack towel I had cross stitched for my mom when she and my dad moved into a new home in 1991-92.

Stitched with waste canvas and 6 strands of floss

Accompanying it was a note from my dad which read “A memento from the past.”

I was amazed at how well the stitching had held up and was amused that my dad had used Mom’s pinking shears to cut it. I don’t know what to do with it, but it was sweet of him to think to save it instead of throwing it away with the rest of the towel.

A year-end finish

I finished a UFO started in 2003. The crazy quilt pattern was pieced with a bundle of red, green, and white homespun fat quarters purchased from can’t-remember-where.

Years later, I regret the gold border, wishing I’d used the same white for it that was used for the back.

But, what’s done is done and I pulled this one out of the closet because, at 54 inches square, it was the perfect size for practice quilting on my new Q-20.

Ditch quilting was done between all the rows and columns, as well as between all the patches. Overlaid onto that was a continuous quilting design of large, gentle curlicues.

The border curlicues mimic those in the top, but with a much tighter curve.

Those tight curves caused the fabric to bunch up quite a bit inside them, so much so, I re-quilted the entire border. Although better, the second attempt was still not quite to my satisfaction, but there comes a point where you must declare “done”.

If I ever quilt this border design again, instead of pin-basting the border layers, they will be generously thread basted to keep everything as flat and smooth as possible to minimize puckering.

The binding fabric was generously donated by a dear quilting friend in Colorado.

Perfect!

While I have plenty of red and green homespuns in my stash, all are quarter-yard cuts, not nearly enough for 200-plus inches of binding. I so appreciate her contribution, as quilt shops in the Houston area are drying up (we just lost another one this month) and shop owners here have never been inclined to carry much, if any, of that type of fabric.

Thanks for checking in. Hope your New Year’s celebration is merry, fun and safe!

Bacon boxers

Did you ever see Jim Gaffigan’s 2009 comedy performance King Baby? We watched it with the boys and enjoyed it immensely, especially when he got going on the subject of bacon. Since then, when we see or smell bacon, we think of Gaffigan running on about bacon and smile. So it seemed like a fun thing to do to make boxer shorts for the boys with bacon fabric.

The pattern featured a mock fly and only had two pieces: a front/back and a waistband. Still, construction was a challenge and when the instructions called for sewing through the two overlapped layers in front to create the mock fly, I didn’t like the way it looked or felt when smoothed out. I also wondered why it was necessary, so I ripped out the stitches and instead, reinforced the opening ¾” below the waistband

and again at the bottom of the fly.

The boys were underwhelmed, so it’s not likely that this pattern will be used again, but I’m still glad I made them.

I also managed to finish two beaded Christmas ornaments that I had purchased many moons ago.

I had started the stocking in Colorado, and finished it first,

after which I decided to tackle the Santa sack.

I enjoy these little kits, but sorting the beads for the Santa sack ornament took an hour. I finally pulled a round baking dish from the kitchen to keep those bouncy, roly-poly beads contained.

Maybe 2018 can be a year of finishes…

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Triple finish

Done, done and DONE! Finally, I finished two UFOs and all eight Santa place mats. I hadn’t done any machine quilting since before we moved in 2014, so I chose smaller projects to ease myself back into the groove.

I admit, shame was the motivating factor for crossing the finish line, particularly since each of these projects was started around the turn of the century. First is the 42″ x 42″ Fences ‘n Firs wall hanging.

Designed by Susan Preglow and Cathy Slatterly, the pattern for this was featured in the January 2000 issue of McCall’s Quick Quilts.

I loved the scrappy nature of the design, but as a newbie quilter back then, I had no stash and no scraps, so I used fat quarters and standard, quarter-yard cuts to piece the top. Now, 17 years later, I can’t imagine my quilting life with no stash, although I could definitely embrace the no-scraps aspect of it!

Quilting this little project was an exercise in one step forward, two steps back. Besides not knowing for the longest time how to quilt the tree blocks, once I did figure it out, I ended up re-quilting all 12 of them because I hated the way they looked. The nylon thread I had used just didn’t look right, so I ended up using matching thread. Tension issues led me to quilt nearly half of them yet a third time.

On top of that, I’m hoping the stain in one of the rail fence blocks hasn’t permanently set in.

I’m not exactly sure how it got there; it’s possibly an acid stain from the packing paper the quilts were wrapped and stored in while we moved and built our house. More likely, it was caused by a Texas cockroach (no amount of pest control keeps them ALL away). Disgusting, I know.

The backing is pieced with leftovers from the top:

I used a simple cable design for the border:

Here’s a look at the free motion machine quilting of a tree from the back:

and a maple leaf:

The vertical lines running through the leaf are the ditch quilting lines inside the rail fence blocks.

My machine quilting is definitely improving, but I still find it intimidating.

My second finish is this simple, 46″ x 54″ quilt:

There must’ve been a perfectly good OCD reason for the last square in the bottom row to be red instead of blue, but so much time has passed, I don’t remember what it was.

The squares are quilted with diagonal lines spaced two inches apart and the sashing strips and border are quilted with a single cable design.

It’s made with Aunt Grace Christmas prints, which were available between 1996 and 2001.

Check out these vintage cuties:

Here is the backing fabric:

The only two places I could have bought these prints is Houston or a little shop in Estes Park, Colorado. The striped fabric used for the binding was purchased at the Houston Quilt Festival in the early 2000s.

Completing the binding for all eight Santa place mats is the third and final finish. Here they are with their matching table runner:

Although the curved edges in this project required it, I discovered that I’m not fond of working with bias binding!

It feels good to say “done,” but there’s still a lot on the list, so I’d best keep on keepin’ on.

Thanks for checking in!

Resolutions? Yeah, well, maybe…

Last month, in typical New Year’s resolution fashion, I plugged all my quilty UFOs into an embarrassingly lengthy Excel spreadsheet to get a

visual

reality check

WAKEUP CALL……….about the true number of tops languishing in the closet that need finishing—after which I dove deep into piecing my batik zig zag nine patch top.

One project I dug up while compiling the spreadsheet was a Santa table runner and set of eight matching placemats which I had started when the boys were little (around the turn of the century) and stashed away under the bed with a serious promise to myself that I would finish them onedaysoon—ha!

Life intervened and those poor, cute little santas snoozed under the bed until last Thanksgiving when, for about two minutes I deluded myself into thinking that I might be able to finish binding the placemats in time for our company Christmas party—ha! The table runner was completely finished and all the placemats had binding sewn on, needing only hand stitching to secure it to the back, but with eight of them, there was just no way.

The plan is to stitch one per month to avoid boredom, but still finish the set in time for Christmas 2017. Now that’s realistic.

Thanks for checking in!

Button wreaths

There is no better activity in life than making something. I ignored fabric and thread last weekend and played with three generations of buttons: mom’s, grandma’s, and mine. I found some cute ideas online and made four new ornaments for the Christmas tree:

I started with a package of four 3½-inch diameter plywood circles from the craft store.

John cut a 2-inch diameter circle from the middle of each one, leaving a ¾-inch rim for the buttons.

First, all the buttons got a quick bath in dish soap and warm water. Then I sorted them by color, setting aside the most interesting ones for the top layer of each wreath.

Instead of hot glue, I used a size 4 flat/shader paint brush to apply tacky glue to the underside of each button.

The tacky glue dries clear, plus I didn’t want to deal with globs and strings of hot glue on such small pieces, some as little as ¼ to ⅜ of an inch.

For the first layer, I used a combination of large and medium sized buttons, generally picking the less attractive buttons or ones that I had a lot of since they were going to be covered anyway.

The bottom layers generally needed between 25 to 30 buttons.

The second layer was created by covering the gaps between buttons in the bottom layer. As much as possible, I tried to evenly distribute the buttons by size, value (light/medium/dark), and finish (shiny vs. matte).

The tacky glue always came up through the holes in the buttons, but it dried clear, so it wasn’t an issue.

I used a wire cutter to clip off the shanks from buttons that had them.

It was fun to go through all the buttons and see the prices on the cards, and recall clothes my mom made for me in junior high and high school. I also enjoyed my grandma’s notes. She would write on the card where she bought her buttons and when:

I hope you’re having fun making something, too!

Boy makes kuchen

This was our first Christmas since moving back to Houston and we’ve been having a good time ever since the boys flew in a week ago. We celebrated Eric’s birthday on the 19^th and marveled at how much better the chocolate cake is when baked at sea level (click here and here for the back story on the chocolate cake).

Because of our temporary housing situation and our desire to unpack as little as possible until we move again, the Christmas tree and all the decorations stayed tucked away upstairs in a hallway closet. We also successfully avoided bringing additional stuff into the house, not setting a single foot inside a mall this season (the kids just want cash anyway) by shopping online and shipping directly to the recipient. Still, it was a fun day with the family all together, sharing our traditional Christmas dinner of lasagna, playing games, helping Ross in the kitchen, and staying unplugged.

When Ross was a sophomore in high school, his German teacher wrapped up the fall semester by asking her students to bring German food to share with the class. That was Ross’s introduction to making kuchen and he’s made it at least once a year since.

Preparing the custard filling.

Kuchen takes on different forms, but our family’s version is made with a yeast dough, fruit and a custard filling. John remembers his mother and grandmother making it but believes the recipe to have been handed down from his great grandmother.

So yesterday was Ross’s day in the kitchen because I’d made the lasagna the day before.

Ross made cinnamon rolls with the extra dough. Between the two of us remembering how our moms made them, John and I were able to guide Ross through all the steps.

After making the first cross cut (much like cutting a strip set in quilting), we heard him exclaim, “Hey, this is a true spiral!”

The dough didn’t get a second chance to rise, but they were still good.

While Ross was busy in the kitchen, John, Eric and I played Scrabble,

then Rummikub.

Merry Christmas, everyone!