Triple Zipper and Jewelry Pouches

 All These goodies are now living with my friends in Tennesee.
They had three birthdays in February, so I made a little something for each of them.

The first one is the tripple zipper pouch.

I had been wanting to make my friend a zippered pouch for a while.

When I went to blogland to find the tutorial I found the Triple-Zip Along and joined in the fun.

It is interesting to see this same pattern made in different color ways.

Click on over to the flikr group to see hundreds more triple zip pouches.

For my friend's two daughters I made them each a Jewelry pouch.

One daughter's favorite color is blue.

The other's favorite color is green. This is what the pouch looks like empty

But you can't give a jewelry pouch without Jewelry in it.

So I filled them both with rings, necklaces, earrings, and candy.

The octopus rings are my favorite!

These pouches are super cute and fairly quick to make.

I want to make more and give them to some other special ladies.

Hmm...it might be nice to have one for myself as well. ;)

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Dare To Dresden

Dare to Dresden Hop is going on this week and today is my day to post.
It has been a weekend of dresdens for me as I prepared for the hop.

First, I had been itching to make a tiny dresden. This one measures 3 inches from point to point.
I turned it into a spiffy pin cushion. For my dresden template I took a small circle, folded in half over and over till I got eight wedges. Then I cut one of the wedges out as my template. Super easy and fast.

I also fiddled around with a 10 degree ruler and made a dresden with 36 plates.
The ruler I used orginally makes a 25 inch circle, but I cut my wedges from a 2.5 inch strip and got small flower petals so my circle measures 10.25 inches. I plan on turning this into a table topper. The wide center circle is the perfect spot to place a nice spring basket.

 I also worked on adding some more wedges to my pastel Dresden Quilt project that I started in September.
I still need to find 8 more pastel fabrics I like to finish up the circle.

It has been fun playing around with dresden plates the past couple days.  Make sure you check out all the other great posts going on today.  You can see them all here:

January 29^th, 2013

A Peach in Stitches

Nancy W @ “that Other Blog”

L3 Designs

Bungalow Bay Quilts

Quilted Delights

Quilt Crossing

Lixie Makes it

A Quilting Sheep

Charlotte's Creations

Quilt-n-Queen
Domesticity and Other Ponderous Things

Sew Much 2 Luv

A Quilt and a Prayer

Amanda Murphy Design

Little Mushroom Cap
Kathy's Quilts

Sandra Kaye Design

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July FNSI

I got lots of progress done during FNSI this weekend.  I finished up Beverly's second quilt and my Mondo bag.  I was gone all day yesterday though and didn't get a chance to take pictures or post my projects so I am doing it today.

I don't have a picture of Beverly's second quilt yet because it has been raining on and off today and I didn't want to risk it getting wet.  I did take some photos of the Mondo Bag though.

This is one huge bag. It is 10 x 10 across the bottom.
And the fusible fleece makes it stand up all on its own.

This is going to be a great bag to carry my show and tell to guild meetings, and for the beach, and for overnight or weekend trips.

I did have trouble with the lining though. The pattern said to make the lining the same way as the outer bag. So I did that, but once everything was sewed together and flipped right side out the outer corners of the bag did not match up with the corners of the lining and the lining would not lay properly inside the bag. It looked like a wadded mess of fabric in the bottom of the bag.  

I couldn't deal with that so I unstitched the whole thing this afternoon. I thought that if I rotated the lining one turn the inner and outer corners would line up. After fiddling with that for an hour and getting no where I finally realized that because of the construction method of this bag I had to sew the lining together in the opposite direction of the instructions. So I unstitched the entire lining and resewed it together, backwards.  After I did that the lining fit snug and now I have nice full corners on the outside and nice smooth lining on the inside.

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Back From Vacation

It seems like I have spent three weeks at the beach.  Although I have come home for a few days in between each visit.  Those days at home were spent getting ready for the next visit.  One week we spent at the beach visiting my husband's daughter.  The next week me and the kids went to visit with my parents.  The next week we were back again for the 4th, and then for a weekend camping trip.  Lots of beach time and I am still not sick of it. I love it there!

That has left little time for sewing though.  I barely managed to finish last month's Schnibble project and have barely had time to work on customer quilts.  I got two basted and spent what spare time I had sewing together muslin backing for four more.  Muslin gets boring to look at for hours on end though so I had to play with a little color last night.  

When I was at the beach during the second week, my mom and I stopped by Quilters Cottage and I picked up the pattern and some pre-cut batiks to make a Mondo Bag.  (I also snatched up some extra batik yardage since they were having a 30% off sale.)

I was pretty skeptical of this pattern at first. It requires pre-printed interfacing, which came with the pattern, and as I was looking at sample bag I didn't see why I would need pre-printed interfacing just to sew squares together.  But.... and this is a big BUT, The interfacing made sewing so much easier and faster!  

You lay out your squares on the interfacing and press them down. It's like a design board on your ironing board, yet you don't have to take it all off the design wall row by rows and then chain stitch them together. Instead you take the whole thing to the sewing machine and start sewing rows. Nothing gets out of order, and nothing falls off.  It is great and fast.

I am excited to get this finished, but I really need to get some quilts quilted, so back to those for the rest of the week.

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April FNSI

For April's Friday Night Sew In we were challenged to make one pillowcase for for Conkerr Cancer, who distributes pillowcases to critically ill children.

I had 28 inches left of this cute frog fabric which is the perfect size for a pillowcase.   It came together super fast.  I even did the french seams on it and it was still fast to put together.

Which meant I could use the majority of my sewing time last night for finishing up the quilting and binding on Sara's Turning 20 quilt.

Sara, a guild mate of mine, had been gathering flower fabrics that represented each state where her children were born.  She also added some other fabrics that represented each child and her husband.  The top and bottom border are forestry fabric to represent her husband and his long career in that field.

I did an all over flowery loop quilting for this quilt.

I love all her flower fabrics, they are all so soft.  My favorite is this pink flowered fabric.

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Finishes in 2011

I orginally wanted to post this collage on Dec 31, but I decided to go out of town on the spur of the moment so my blogging schedule got a little out of whack, so here it is a few days late. 

 A year of finishes for 2011.

These are all the projects I made from start to finish.  7 of these were part of the Le Petite Challenge that ran from the fall of 2010 to the fall of 2011.   2 of my quilts won ribbons this year- a first for me and  I was super excited about that.

I am impressed with myself for accomplishing so much in 2011 and I plan to be just as productive for 2012.  I even have a jump start.  I just need to add the binding on the Diamond Star quilt that I quilted at Thanksgiving and I will have one finish in the bag.

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Merry Christmas



I made a couple other goodies this year for others.  The first I want to show off are these cute little candy sleighs.  I made some for my nieces and nephews and school teachers.  I saw these on the blog Ellyn's Place and just had to make some of my own.  They have a great tutorial there.  You can see it here.

Next I put together a circle Table Topper for my friend in TN. 



I had fun making this one.  It was my first ever circle quilt.  It is small 26 inches wide.  I used the the free pattern from Phillips Fiber Art.  It also came on the back of my mini ten degree ruler I bought last month.  You can get the pattern here.

 I gave my sister and her hubby a basket of goodies that came with all the tools needed to make cake pops.  I also made her this spiffy apron to go with it so she could make them in festive style.  The apron pattern is a McCalls Pattern.  Working on the top neckline reminded me why I prefer making quilts instead of clothes, but I persevered and it turned out great.

Merry Christmas to you all!!

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Fabric Christmas Ornament

Tonight I am teaching the girls at church to make fabric Ornaments.
I only have an hour to teach them so I made up little kits for them to help save on time.

 I bought one yard of light blue snowflake fabric which was enough main fabric for 9 ornaments. 

The white and the dark blue came from my stash. I ran out of white though so I cut up some red and green fabrics for the last three sets.

I made a sample out of the green and red for the girls to see,
but I can't wait to see how the blue and white ones will turn out.

I used the tutorial from Crafter Without a Cat.

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Bag for Jay

I have been watching a cute eight and half month old baby the past couple weeks, and his mom had been bringing me his food every morning in a plastic Wal-Mart bag, so I sewed him a cuter one during his nap time the other day.  I used two fat quarters for this - the kites and a bright yellow.  I didn't use a pattern, I just cut some rectangles and sewed it up.  It isn't very large, just big enough to hold a couple of jars of baby food and a small thermos of water.

I love the cheerful kites and the bright yellow.  

It makes me happy every time I look at this bag.  

:)

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From This....

To This....

 Today I finished zig zagging the smaller one and glued the swirly part on the big one.

Is it too early to put out fall decorations?

The two bowls combined are made up of 100 yards of cotton clothesline.
My Daughter wrapped all the clothesline for me while she watched TV.  

Below is the fabric we used for both bowls.  I got a lot of it a couple years ago for about $1 a yard so I didn't mind cutting some of it up for these bowls.  It has all my favorite fall colors in it and I was anxious to see how it would look in these bowls.

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Side Tracked with The Abbey Bag

I got the new Connecting Threads catalogue in the mail the other day and saw this cute scrap bag kit.  It is The Abbey Bag pattern and uses their new line of sewing themed fabrics.  I thought they looked really cute and ordered myself a kit.  It came in the mail Saturday and I started on it right away.  I finished them both up Sunday afternoon and can't decide which one I like best. I suppose I could keep one at my cutting table and one at the sewing machine.  :)

Very seldom do my two cats sit by each other, they usually prefer opposite couches, but this morning I guess the sun coming in the window and the soft quilt made them both want to relax in the same place.

Jasper and Sheen

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Matching Diaper Pouch

 This diaper pouch came together lickety split. It took me less than an hour to complete it from start to finish.  I do believe I was able to make it so quick because I had already made one before, so this time around I didn't have to spend time learning the pattern, which can be found for free here.

I  used the same fabrics from the pinwheel quilt to make the stripes on the pouch.  But instead of using white to exactly match the quilt, I used a yellow fabric for the bottom and linging.  This will get carried around a lot in the bottom of another bag, and I was worried the white would get too dirty so I went for yellow instead.

I sure wish I had one of these when I had babies.  I always had diapers and wipes strewn all over my diaper bag.  This would have kept everything nice and compact. I would have only needed to grab this pouch to have all my necessities for diaper duty.

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It Has Arrived

My friend's bag has arrived and she LOVED it! And now that she has it, I won't spoil any surprises by showing it off here.  I used the the Profession Tote pattern from The Creative Thimble. I am so excited about it. I really had a good time making this bag.  The shark fabric was really fun to work with.   I even have a little shark fabric leftover so I will have to find some cute little patterns to help use it up.

I added some small embroidery designs to the inside pockets.
I saw these cute shark designs at Embroidery Library and thought they would go perfect in the bag.

This bag is loaded with pockets, inside and out.  It fits everything.  I love it.

Happy Birthday Ilox!!!

(^^^)