Inspired by the reindeer gift card holder I made at Christmas, as well as some Halloween decorations that my mom made a few years back, I decided to try to make some Valentine’s Day decorations for my brick fireplace. Felt sticks to the bricks without needing anything else to adhere them, so it was the perfect medium. The only supplies you need is some felt in varying colors (I used white, light pink, bright pink, red, black with silver glitter hearts and red with black swirls), DMC floss and a needle to piece everything together. I made a couple of paper heart patterns, but after a couple of times, I just starting cutting free hand.  Mainly I put them together while I was watching some TV, so they went together pretty quickly and now I’ve got a fully decorated fireplace! 

Tonight starts a full week of soccer, so hopefully I can break out of the cold-weather blues from last week and get some good mileage in. What are your plans for the week? Is it warm enough to get outside for your runs?

One of the things I wanted to make sure to have space for in my house was a small design wall for quilts. I wasn’t sure where to put it, but I decided a few days ago to build one on the bi-fold doors in my office / craft room. I got some grey flannel fabric and a few pieces of styrofoam poster board and just measured each section of the door to see how big each piece should be. To attach the fabric to the poster board, I used duct tape (there’s probably a better way to do it) and then used some of the Command picture & frame hanging strips to attach the boards to the doors. The overall design wall is only about 45″ x 42″ but that will fit most of my quilting design needs. Sometimes I’ll venture into a lap size / something to use to snuggle on the couch with, but for the most part, I typically stick to wall hanging or smaller size quilts. 

Of course, once I put up the design wall, I had to try it out! First up was a set of the 5″ squares that were cut up last week. I combined the newly cut 5″ squares with the ones I had left from my stash and created 14 sets and there are still a lot of leftover pieces! About half of the sets are completely random, pulling fabric from all of the different piles and just making sure not to repeat any patterns, but since I had a lot of different patterns in some standard colors (blue, green, red/pink, yellow, orange, etc.) I decided to try something new with a few of the sets – I picked out random colors and patterns for half of the blocks and the other half of the blocks I picked from a specific color. The first set I chose to play with was one that featured blue blocks.

After putting it all up on the wall, the blue color doesn’t stand out as much as I thought it would while I was picking out the colors, so I decided to try it with a yellow / orange set instead. For this one, I organized the colors a bit more, so it’s a little more obvious of a pattern, but I’m still amazed at how easily the colors just blend in with the rest of the patterns in the quilt. I think this one is definitely brighter than the blue one, but it’s not necessarily apparent that the diagonal lines match in color, which I’m surprised by.

Finally, I wanted to dig out Bonnie Hunter’s Easy Street mystery quilt that I started last winter. I pretty much have all of the pieces cut (except the 4 corners) and all I need to do is actually sit down and sew it all together. While I was home, I was able to see my mom’s finished version and I really like the way it turned out, so maybe if I keep it up on my design wall, I’ll be more motivated to finish it! Unfortunately, you have to wait for Bonnie’s next book to come out to get the instructions on how to make this quilt, but I can share her blog post that features my mom showing off her Easy Street quilt at a class she took over the summer. Needless to say we shared some of the fabrics for this quilt, though she chose more of a typical blue color for some of her blocks while I gravitated toward the teal side of the spectrum.

How do you lay out the designs for your quilts – a design wall, the floor or a table?  

Yesterday was a quilting day, or more appropriately for me, a cutting fabric day. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve started to run low on unique fabrics for the baby quilts that I make. For each quilt, I need 56 different 5″ squares. So, I brought some fabrics from home and figured that I would have some time while I was in Pennsylvania to cut some new squares. I started out by just cutting the 5″ squares from the fabric that I brought, but quickly my mom offered up some of her stash to add to my collection. Soon, not only was I cutting 5″ squares, but she was too! We also tried to use up some of the scraps that she had in bags from who-knows-when, so in addition to the 5″ squares, we now had piles of 2″ strips, 2.5″ squares and 1.5″ strips. Anything that was too small for a 1.5″ strip got tossed (!) and we finally made a dent in some of the scrap bags.

I don’t know how many different fabrics are now in 5″ squares, but the squares in the picture below have been sorted into 25 different categories including colors (pink, blue, brown, etc.), transportation (boats, motorcycles, dump trucks), people (vikings, clothing, doctors), food (potatoes, cupcakes, apples), Winnie the Pooh, soccer, hockey, bugs (ladybugs, dragonflys) and other animals (cats, horses, turtles, frogs). There are so many unique patters that I’m sure to have enough variety for many quilts to come!

Since a lot of gift cards don’t come with holders anymore, I wanted to make something to put one in for a Christmas present. Luckily, I know people who collect patterns to all kinds of things! My mom made a bunch of felt Christmas ornaments a few years ago and in with all of her felt, there was a pattern for a reindeer gift card holder. Even better, she had kept the original website with the pattern, so I’m happy to share My Little Mochi’s felt reindeer pouches pattern with you! It was originally posted in 2007 and it looks like since then there’s been a lot of other freebie patterns posted on the site as well as some books and even a shop where you can buy some of the more complicated patterns. I tweaked the reindeer pattern a bit since I was able to find buttons for the eyes and nose and substituted a button closure on the back instead of a snap. Probably a bit too late to be much help for anyone else for Christmas this year, but there’s always next year!

Do you have any creative gift card holder ideas?

It all started with a baby quilt… over the last two weeks I’ve made a baby quilt, a fabric wreath and a fabric tree.

As I mentioned yesterday, I did the Turkey Trot in a costume. Originally a group of us had  started talking about dressing up for this race as soon as we finished last year’s race. The theme was set: Thanksgiving side dishes – mashed potatoes, corn, yams, basically any type of food besides a turkey. So I quickly claimed my costume and started plotting how I could manage to create something that I could still run in! 

Fast forward to early fall and we all started talking again about how we should dress up for the race and get coordinated… sometime soon. So last week when I tried to get confirmation that the rest of the group was still planning to run in costumes, I realized that I was probably the only one going to show up in costume. But, I had the poms and the felt and raffia, I couldn’t back out now!