Handmade Holiday Time

Last week, after sending the prizes to the finalists of the Sewing Bee, I tried to get inspired as to what to sew and make for someone, I sewed a few mini quilt blocks that I hadn’t sewn in a while. Sometimes it helps me to sew something quick and familiar to get into a groove.

Here are the prize bundles for the 3 finalists. The winner also received a $75 gift certificate to American Girl Doll company.

Here’s a mini disappearing 4 patch block that I made that day. Pretty fiddly.

I decided to make my sister a quilted project, a couch organizer, and try a hand look quilting stitch that my new machine has. I worked on it for a couple days, but couldn’t get it to look the way I wanted. I’m not a fan of the polyfilament thread and so I haven’t used it much before. I couldn’t get the tension adjusted to show the color thread as much as I wanted. Increasing the tension as much as I could without having the polyfilament thread break was a challenge.

I didn’t like what it was able to do. It didn’t look very handmade to me–just looked a bit odd. I need to practice more, but I also wanted to get her present done and in the mail. I also have other projects in progress and then maybe I’ll continue with my stocking saga (I’ll save that for another post). If you have followed my blog, you may remember my stocking saga that’s been going on for years.

I decided to try a couple other ways. This is a sashiko style quilting that I tried next. I liked the row on the bottom using Sulky 12 wt. cotton, so I ended up doing that in a cross hatch pattern.

Here’s the project finished.

I’ve been sewing with my daughter several days a week this month. We made these folded star ornaments and I sent a couple to my sister, along with some assorted goodies and her couch organizer. I’ll post a tutorial of how we made these soon. It’s a no sew project, and we worked through and discovered some things that made them go together more easily. We found most tutorials were not very clear and there may or may not have been some crying involved in the making of said stars. Once we worked out the idea, we found some helpful things to do that made a huge difference.

This is the first year she has a tree of her own and we thought the star ornaments would be great for filling in all over, as she doesn’t have too many ornaments of her own.

Did you make some handmade gifts this year? It’s always so much fun making things for others while listening to carols.

~Erin