For the past few year's I've taken a cue from various "countdown to the day" blog hops and quilt alongs and embarked on my own during the after-Christmas period. I've found it is usually easier than normal to chill out, check out and put in extra time in my quilt space while I await the start of the New Year.
As far back as October, I had started making a list of the things I wanted to try to tackle during this period. Needless to say the impetus as I roll towards the end of the year is to also try and clear out a few things so as not to carry them into the New Year.
There Was Some Christmas Gift Quilting Done
Speaking of clearing out, I did do a little prior to Christmas as well. Since the biggest Christmas gift I had to give was this one finished back in October.....
....I only had to wrap it along with a few other treats I was sending with it. My husband and I took it over to its recipient on Christmas Eve where it was well received!
I also made three bowl cozies. One was for my MIL which arrived in North Carolina yesterday. When we had visited her back in October she had been frantically looking for the "Yellowstone" one I had made her last year and that she had misplaced. I found her frenzy about it funny since she's a quilter and can make her own. She even has access through her guild to the Accuquilt die for cutting them out, LOL!
Even though she has since located it (hidden between some stored fabric as I had suspected), I made and sent her a new backup one along with the Peanut Butter cookies I bake for her this time of year. We are going to be working on curved ruler quilting on her longarm when I go back down to visit her in February and I took the opportunity to do a little of that on it with my domestic machine. Unfortunately, in my rush to get it packed up and out in the mail last weekend, I forgot to take a picture of it which seems to be a theme as you will see.
I made the other two for a friend of mine who I share a love of certain TV shows with. I finally made good on at least some of the plans I've had for a while to make ones for us for a bunch of shows. This week I got one done for "Call the Midwife" so we'd have them just in time for the airing of their annual Christmas Day special . I also made a (long over due) "Game of Thrones" one which can now serve in honor of the "Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (Dunk & Egg)" GOT prequel coming out on January 18th. Since these were also rushed into production and packaging to get the gift out in time, I forgot to take pictures of those too! However, yesterday for Day 1 of the "7 Days" projects, I got to work on two of the same for myself.
I had actually miscut by a 1/2" the starting squares for the two for my friend so had to cut new squares to complete hers. I then planned to use the miscut squares to make cozies for myself and to see if it actually made a big difference in how they'd come out. One of the reasons I had opted to re-cut the fabric for hers was that I used these precut batting squares for them to save some prep time:
Having cut the fabric squares to be used with them the wrong size, I didn't want to have to cut down batting that was already prepped. For the mis-cut squares for my cozies, I cut new batting squares and trimmed them with this:
I had purchased this template back when I first embarked on the project of making multiple bowl cozies. While it was primarily designed to be used for cutting the corners when you make bags, Carolina Moore who designed it also has a pattern (available in print or digital) for using it to trim the parts for bowl cozies. I had used the template to cut the rounded corners on the fabric squares I used with the pre-cut batting pieces but also love that it has notches to also cut the side darts for squares cut from my own batting.
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| Inside and Outside of the finished cozies (although they are reversible). |
Ta Da! They are not quite as wide and deep as they should be even though I thought I adjusted the length of the dart on the smaller pieces of batting enough to make them so. However, they still work fine with a soup bowl. It's actually good timing to get them done since DH and I didn't get to watch the "Midwife" special yet, so I can use mine when we watch the recording of it this weekend. I still have plans for cozies for at least one more show my friend and I both like but since it doesn't come on again until the summer, that can wait.
The last of the Christmas gifts I worked on this week was for another friend of mine who I've made a lot of things for before. She is a big fan of Gnomes so I am often on the lookout for things with that theme for her. Two years ago while doing the All Carolina's Shop Hop (and note they are changing the regions and dates for next year), I came across a cute little Fall themed applique mini quilt kit in one of the shops. Hanging near it was one of those Ackfeld hangers just the right size for it. So of course I bought both! Back in November when I planned to work on a wool applique wallhanging for my home, I also pulled out her kit and figured I could make it up along with it and get a Christmas gift done too. Well, while I only got as far as tracing the templates out for my wallhanging, I did sit down this week and make up her mini quilt!
Ironically, plans for us to get together for Christmas fell through but we are going to do a meet-up in January and exchange Christmas gifts then so now I'm all ready for that!
Catching Up on the December To Do List
Unfortunately, all of the actual plans I had for December quilting and cross stitch fell by the wayside this past month. After having an incredibly productive Fall, it looks like I had burned myself out since I didn't even sit down to stitch anything until the week before Christmas! So the "7 Days" task for Day 2 today was to do some catch-up which first and foremost was to cut out my "Alaska" BOM blocks for this month.
Originally my plans for December had been to make these blocks which would have continued the "pieced triangle" journey I had been on for the last few months.
However, I needed to make eight of those so rather than stress myself out with just a few days of the month that I have left, I decided to pivot to making a block that has the simpler plain triangles and for which I only needed four blocks. However as I gathered the stash I needed to make the blocks I thought I was going to make, I happened to glance at the bag where I've stored the blocks finished to date and saw these:
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| This picture was taken right after I made them back in November. |
Turns out I had actually made these up the day before Thanksgiving and totally forgot I had done so! Guess that means they must have been pretty easy to make huh?!? Fortunately there was another set of "easy" blocks that needed to be made up. So now these are the blocks I made today for my December BOM blocks:
Now that they are finished, I can put this project away until I'm ready to start the blocks for January. I am also thrilled that I've managed to stay on track on this project!
So the plans for Day 3 tomorrow is to work on a couple more "clean-up projects". I also realize that one of the projects on my list -- a "to be quilted" project -- I may actually save to take with me to finish at my MIL's in February. Hmmm, that means I'd need to find something else for that spot. Well, I certainly have plenty of candidates around for that so we'll see what happens!
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