Felt Flower Hairpins

My daughter Nikki and I (with some great help from my friend Tracey) finished making these cute felt flower hairpins this evening. Nikki's class is having a "City" day where some of the kids sell products and some of them are buyers. Nikki is a seller so we decided to make these hairpins. They're pretty easy and turned out very cute. Now my other daughters each want to make some for themselves.

Cut a piece of felt about 6 to 8" by 3-5". Fold it over and glue along the edge. Then cut 1/4" cuts up to the glued edge.Loop ribbons or yarn and sew the loops down along the glued edge.
Add another line of glue along the sewn edge.
Roll the piece allowing the glued edge to keep it rolled together. I used a low temp glue gun for this.
Glue gun or stitch a button in the center. Glue a hair clip onto the back and it's finished.

Scalloped border

Thank you Diane for lending me your scallop border ruler. It sure made it easy to make this scalloped border on Nikki's baptism quilt. I marked the border with the ruler, sent the quilt to be quilted and once I had it home, I cut out around the scalloped border lines.
So far I've sewn the binding to the edge of the quilt and now I'm ready to turn it to the back and blind stitch it down.

This is one of my favorite parts of quilting. I'm not sure why-it's not particularly fast. I must just like being forced to sit quietly, sew by hand, day dream and see a new quilt come to life as it's finished. It's very satisfying.

To Quilt or Not to Quilt

I can't seem to finish this wallhanging and the only reason is because I can't decide whether I should quilt the background sky behind the tree and if I do quilt it, how should I quilt it. The pattern suggests weaving back and forth in long S-formations. It looks ok, but I may not be that precise of a machine quilter. If I leave it blank, does it look like I didn't really care about it and just slapped a tree onto a background, added borders and called it good? The tree took a tremendous amount of work, cutting it out and machine quilting with my feed dogs down every branch and limb. I like how it looks now and don't want to ruin it, but if I can enhance it a bit with machine quilting, that would be even better.
In the end, I may just quilt the borders, add a binding, hang it and look at it for months. Then if I get a brilliant idea, I should still be able to take it to the machine and quilt the sky. Sounds wimpy, but I'll be the first to admit my weaknesses with machine quilting.

mini iron

Had to search high and low with all my quilting friends, but finally found Diane who had one of these mini irons. I was just about to start ironing my tree onto the background, but with all the intricate little branches I knew using a regular size iron was a disaster waiting to happen. This mini iron did the trick and it was so easy to use. I loved it. It's now officially on my wish list for upcoming Mother's Day/Birthdays/ Valentine's Day/Christmas, etc.
This is going to be a wall hanging and so far I'm very excited about it. After attaching the final borders, quilting around each limb will be my next big task. Wish me luck...

First attempt with a purse

So I finally hopped on the band wagon and found a purse pattern I really wanted to have and make. When I saw Heather Mulder Peterson's Bella Bag pattern, I knew I wanted to make it. I made the large bag from the pattern.
I used material I had purchased while I was in the Dominican Republic picking up my son from his LDS church mission. It's a fabric with embroidery already on it and I loved the colors. They didn't really have any quilting fabric, so I picked up this fabric instead. The pattern was easy to follow and would have been much easier if I had fabric that was the usual 44" wide, but this particular fabric was only about 21" wide, so I ended up having to piece the handles and make them a little bit shorter instead of having each handle cut from just one piece of fabric. I would have preferred to make the handles from the fabric used in the bottom half of the purse, but there just wasn't enough left. I used the grommets that just snap into place and I loved them. I will definitely be using them for many other projects. I used some fabric glue also in between the grommets like Heather recommended. The lining is just a blue/green plaid from my stash and I sewed 3 pockets onto it.
Can't wait to use my new purse now. I'm already looking at my stash to make another bag from this pattern.

Baptism quilt embroidery

I'm off to the quilter today, Terri Hair, to get Nikki's quilt beautifully quilted. She always does an amazing job and I don't mind paying extra for quilts that are meant to be very special. Here are some close-ups of the embroidery work I did on her quilt. The only one that isn't quilted is the scripture verse. I actually printed that onto fabric.

Last baptism quilt

Here I am finishing up my last baptism quilt for my kids. Nikki is our youngest, she turned 8 last year and was baptized. So as is my custom, she gets a quilt. Nikki chose the colors and I love how it's turning out. Right now I'm looking for more fabric for the border. Why don't I just get enough fabric in the first place? I tend to leave my design ideas for the border until I see the finished top, that's why. I know it's not a good habit, but...Maybe I'll learn one day.


The flowers on this are layered and are called French Roses. The center is just something I designed using a similar method as the flowers. After it's quilted I'll be adding some cute buttons to the centers of the little hearts.


Each embroidered square says something about Nikki's life and I'll post again just highlighting the embroidery squares.
So far though, Nikki's very excited about her new quilt.

Braided table runner

I love my new table runner and I loved it when I first saw it in the book Livin Large by Heather Mulder Peterson.  In fact, there are quite a few quilts in that book that I'm planning on making. The table runner was very easy to make and the directions were great. I'm also now a fan of Heather Mulder Peterson's blog, you ought to check it out.

The braiding is actually laid over a solid piece of fabric and is raw edge.

Watches for the girls

I got together with a group of friends to make these watches. We ordered our watch faces from a fun website ewatchwholesale.com, then picked out beads to attach. I ended up making 3 watches, one for each of my daughters for Christmas. I wrapped them in cute boxes so they would know they were a little special. Sometimes there's so many little gifts laid out on Christmas that nothing looks very special. The girls loved them and they fit perfectly on each one. Even though the beads are threaded onto a stretchy cord, you have to be at least close to the right size of wrist. I chose each girl's favorite color for her watch, so they were thrilled and have worn them just about every day. They were so easy to make, I may have to put one together for myself now.

Menu planner

While making watches for my daughters at a friend's house (pictures to come later), I noticed a cute menu planner on her wall in the kitchen. I took a quick picture of it with my phone and she said she'd send me a template for it. Sometimes you just see something and become driven to make it or have it. Well, that's what happened with me. I knew I wanted to make it, but I put my own twist on it.

Her dinner options attached with velcro, but I decided to make mine magnetic. Her background was fixed, but I decided I wanted to change my background each month. So here's what I came up with. I had fun picking out cute papers for my backgrounds, but my kids have loved this. They can easily see what's for dinner and what's coming up for dinner in the next few days. They also get pretty excited to help me pick the menu. I can always add new menu items, but as a family we tried to pick out the general favorites.




I made sure to add one called "new recipe night" which gives me the option of trying anything. I also added "leftovers" and "girls cook" which my daughters loved. I have the templates for the calendar and the menu items if anyone's interested.

Material Girls Christmas Luncheon 09

Material Girls Idaho Oct 09

Went to my quilt group today, Material Girls Idaho, and as usual it was motivating and fun. Here's a slide show of the quilts and wallhangings, etc that were shown in the "Sew and Tell". Enjoy!

8 Years

This month marks 8 years since we moved to Idaho from South Carolina. We moved to be closer to family, most of them live in the West. But leaving South Carolina was hard. It's a beautiful state and I have wonderful friends there. My quilt guild on Hilton Head Island was especially hard to leave and I was part of 3 smaller quilt groups that met monthly too.

This is a quilt that one of my groups made for me as a good-bye gift. Each friend paper pieced a square and also signed one of the squares. It hangs in my family room and is such a treasure to me now. That's what quilts do for you. They become a legacy of love long after the makers have moved on.

Table topper

Finally finished my table topper which I'll probably use in the fall and winter months. I think I may have to start making more table toppers and back of the couch quilts because they're so quick and I can actually machine quilt them myself. There's some wonderful series of books called Toppers by Nancy Smith Lynda Milligan which gave me the idea. She has lots of fun ideas for topper quilts.
With this topper, I was able to use scraps from my stash. Now that's a great feeling.

End of the year Teachers presents

I saw these online one day and thought they'd make a cute present for my daughters' teachers. It just so happens that they each have a teacher whose name starts with "W" so I'm only showing one picture. But I think they really turned out cute. It's the one time my girls got to break crayons legally. We actually ended up putting a couple 3-D scrapbooking stickers on a couple corners just before wrapping them up also. The girls signed their names on the back. Shadow boxes have so much potential for lots of cute ideas.

Aprons for Argentina friends

Before my trip to Argentina I decided I wanted to take some gifts. We picked up books, posters, candies, etc and I also made 2 aprons for ladies I had been exchanging emails with, Maria and Marcela. (My daughter Kristina is here modeling them for me so I could have a keepsake of what I'd made.) Another email friend was Susana, but I had previously sent an apron to her through the mail. I was so excited to meet them and wanted to take them something home made from me. Both of them are amazing and fun women and I thoroughly enjoyed being with them, eating with them, talking and laughing with them, shopping with them and just being in their company. Oh how I wish we lived closer! But what a blessing it is to live in a day and age with email and instant communication.