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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Last of the 7

I finally got the binding on today!
The quilt has been waiting for almost two months for binding.
Once I got my sewing motivation back it was quick to finish up.

Not sure why my desire to create with fabric waned, but I can feel it creeping back up.
I finished a couple more projects as well but pictures will have to wait till a certain package arrives next week.

This is my 1rst quilt finish for 2013.

And is the seventh and final shirt quilt for my husband's Aunt Darla.

Here are all seven quilts together.

Time to call Aunt Darla and set up a dinner date and deliver them all.

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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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Covered Notebook

My friend celebrated her birthday last week and I wanted to make her something special.
We are both attending college classes together so I decided to make a cover for her notebook so she can jot down notes in style. He favorite things are tie dye, peace signs, and rainbows.  So when I saw this fabric at the Hobby Lobby, I snatched it up and put it in my cart.

I didn't have a pattern, Instead I measured the notebook and cut the fabric to match with 1/4 inch seam allowance.  Next time I will give myself a little more seam allowance. When I turned everything inside out I lost more than a 1/4 of an inch and the note book fits kinda of tight.

This is my first completed project for 2013.  Last year I kept a running total of my finished quilts only.
Perhaps this year I will make a running list of other projects as well.

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Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

2012 was a great year for quilts around here. I completely finished 18 quilts of various sizes.

I was so close to getting 19 finishes for the year, I only needed to add binding to one more and I would have had it.  Instead I spent the remainder of 2012 playing games with the kids and visiting relatives.  The time was well spent and even though I didn't reach 19 finishes it all works out in the end. I got to visit and create memories and now I am super close to a finish for 2013. Hurrah!  :)

These are all 18 projects. A couple may look like duplicates, but they are slightly different.

Hopefully I can be just as productive for 2013.

I'll keep you posted!

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Christmas Crafting

Wow, it has been a busy month.  I didn't get everything on my schedule finished, but I got what was needed finished. First I basted my Starry Night Christmas Quilt, which is on the schedule to quilt during the rest of Christmas Break.

I also basted the last shirt quilt (which I didn't get a picture of) and my Slide Show quilt.

Next on the list was cutting out the fabrics for a new Christmas Quilt.  I asked my brother if I could have some of his beach photos to hang on my wall, (He takes great Ocean wave and beach shots and sells them on his Surf Report Website, Nimbuss Grand Strand Surfing, under the Seascape Photography link.)  He said he would gladly trade me some of his ocean shots for a Christmas quilt, so I picked out 20 red fabrics, and 20 green fabrics and got cutting.

I actually cut out enough to make a couple different Christmas quilts, but for now I focused on making my brother's quilt. 

 I started turning the squares in to Half Square Triangles and was on a roll laying them out and sewing blocks together when my daughter came down with an illness.  We took her to the hospital a day later when we ruled out a stomach virus, but it was too late, her appendix had burst and she and I had an all exclusive 6 day stay in the hospital.

There wasn't much to do for six days in the hospital other than watch TV and play with our tablets and that got boring after awhile, so I brought my knitting needles along and finished up some Christmas presents.  I knitted 10 dishcloths while waiting things out in the hospital.   I had a few already made from the past couple months, and made a few more the last couple weeks before Christmas for a total of 35.  

(The photo below only has 31.  I mailed four before I thought to stack them all and take a photo.)

I made a total of 9 sets that I gave away for Christmas.

And as always, my pets are always close by when I am crafting.

I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas.

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2 More Finishes

Shirt Quilt #5 of 7.



I finished adding the binding yesterday.
This finish #17 for the year.






Shirt Quilt #6 of 7.

It is similar to shirt quilt #3, but it has different quilting.

 This is finish #18 for the year.

2 more done, only one 1 go,
I'm on the home stretch!

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4th Shirt Quilt Finished

This is the 4th completed quilt of the 7 Shirt quilts I have been working on.

I finished the quilting last night and put the binding on this afternoon.

This quilt is similar to finished Shirt Quilt #2. 

The main difference is the rotation of the 9 patches, and the quilting.

This makes finish #16 for the year.

I have two more shirt quilts almost finished.
They have been quilted for awhile now, they just need binding put on.

I'll get that on tomorrow and then I will have two more finishes for the year.
Then I will only have one shirt quilt left to finish.
I can feel these being done in plenty of time for Christmas.

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Leaf Blocks

The leaf part of my blocks are all finished. I am excited to add the corner stripes, but that will have to wait till next month.  The sewing machine is booked up the month of December with Christmas projects.

First on the list is finishing up Aunt Darla's shirt quilts. They have been in my care long enough and  it is time to push and get them finished in time for her to give them away at Christmas.

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Back to the Leaves

I haven't been sewing much lately because I have been spending most of my evenings painting the upstairs rooms. We have slowly been working on turning our attic into two rooms since we moved into this house and are on the home stretch so I have been excited to work up there, which means my sewing time has been almost non existent  The few minutes I could squeeze in this week I worked on my leaf quilt.

I have most of the blocks sections sewn together.  Next I need to finish the paper piecing sections and make 19 more stems. Then I can sew the blocks together.  

I have been flip flopping between this project and my orange wedges.  Mainly because I am not sure how to finished the wedges. So instead of thinking too hard on that project, I went with easy sewing this week.

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Playing With Triangles

I got all my triangle wedges cut out and laid them all on my design board.
I started out with this...

Then added a few more triangles. 

But I felt like it needed a little something else so I added corners.
Now I just need to figure out fabrics to put in between all these triangles.
All black or more orange? I'll have to fiddle with it.

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More Orange Strips

There hasn't been much sewing going on lately other than the three blog hops I participated in and Halloween costumes, but this week I was able to sneak in some 15 minute intervals of sewing time and got some progress on a couple projects.

 
First I cut and sewed together some more orange strips.

When I originally made my mini quilt for the Wicked Blog hop I had 10 wedges left over.

I played around with the leftovers and added some black sashing.
Then I decided a lot more wedges would make great throw size Halloween quilt that I can use next year.
So I made 6 more oranges strips.  They are all pressed and ready to be cut into wedges.

 
From each strip I can cut enough wedges to make 2 spider blocks.

After I sewed and pressed my orange strips together I got back to cutting out my fabrics for my leaf block.
I cut most of the pieces to make 19 more leaf blocks. 

 

 While I was cutting and trimming I noticed that my Kaleido-Ruler is the same size as the corner strips on my leaf block.  When I made the first block I paper pieced these corners, but I am thinking about sewing strips and then cutting wedges for this block as well.  If I do that though, I will have opposite wedges that don't go in the block so I will have to come up with something to do with the extra wedges.

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