Christmas Table Runner

One of my "101 Things This Year" goals is to complete 5 Christmas decorations by September. I made that goal before we found out we're expecting...but now it makes even more sense. I know that if I don't get things made ahead of time, it's not going to happen. Today I finally finished my first Christmas item, a disappearing 9-patch table runner for my dining room.  I made a table runner similar to this for a friend for Christmas this past year and decided I really liked it...luckily I had enough fabric that I could make me one too! I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out and I'm excited to have something fun and pretty and homemade to spruce up the table at Christmas.

Crazy Quilt

I took a class at Aunt Judy's Attic to learn how to make this paper pieced crazy quilt. 

The original was a wall hanging, but I figured if I just added a row I could turn it into a baby blanket. I decided to go with (surprise surprise) orange and blue as my color scheme. I already had a big bag of orange and blue scraps (from my yo-yo curtain project, chevron puff quilt project, and my lamp shade project) and found I had enough left over white fabric from another sewing project, so this didn't really cost me anything extra at all (which is always happy!). 

Every seam on a crazy quilt block is technically supposed to have an embellishment. I hand embroidered some, and then stitched on ric rac or ribbon to others, and fake appliqued some shapes on others but I got lazy and didn't want to do every single seam...so I just did a few key squares and called it good. 

The back will be just a plain blue and then the binding will be the orange batik you see in the photo below. I'll have to post up pictures when I get it completely finished. I thought I had a piece of batting big enough in my closet but I don't, otherwise I'd be working on it right now. Oh well...another day. 

Clown Painted Panels

For The Pintester Movement Emilee and I were invited to participate in with Pinstrosity, I couldn't decide which project I wanted to do and feature. I ended up doing two projects and featuring the lamp (that post is here), but I wanted to show you this one as well. I have various panel paintings pinned on Pinterest. I've wanted to do a panel painting for a while, but I just didn't know what to do. I finally found what I wanted and got to work. It isn't really the kind of panel painting I had in mind (where one picture is split between the 3-4 panels), but I do like how this turned out and someday I'll do a "real" panel painting. 

Here's what I did. 

I started out with 4 cardboard fabric bolts. I tried to pick ones that weren't bent and which were all the same size. 

I then covered the front side (the side without the seam) in acrylic gesso. I'd never used gesso before and I love it! It only took two coats to get the boards white enough and I love the texture that it gave them. It felt like I was working on canvas. 

I then painted the tops and bottoms of the boards in orange and blue to accent the panels. 

I had previously found the Clancy the Clown transfers from Aunt Martha's Transfers. I picked the four I liked best (and the ones that would fit on the width of the boards) and followed the directions to transfer them on. The transfer wasn't perfect, but it was enough to see what I needed. 

Then I went hunting for my paints. I looked and looked and looked, but couldn't find them. Cameron came in the house and found them within 30 seconds. So glad I have him around! I just used regular crafting acrylics that I got at Wally World. 

Like my painting mat? The DDR mat doesn't work anymore and we just haven't gotten it to the dump yet, so it served nicely as a painting mat. 

And there they are all hung up in Merle's room. I really like how they turned out! 

All growing up, a clown painting done by my Great-Grandma hung in my brother's room and I've always loved it. It still belongs to my mother, but she doesn't have a place figured out to display it right now in their home, so she's letting me hang it up until she knows where she wants it (at which time I'll get a print made and hang the print up in my house so mom can have the original back). I also have 6 clown figurines my sister was going to throw away but which I thought they were too cute to trash so I salvaged them. With those two elements already in place, I thought it would be fun to add a few more clown elements to Merle's room. I'm not going all out here with a clown theme. Just a few fun touches for the room.  

Fabric Strip Lampshade

Remember this lamp...

that got revamped into this lamp?

Well...it got one more update and now it looks like this:

To see how I did it and where I got my inspiration, head over to Pinstrosity. 

Chevron Puff Quilt

I went to Terrific Tuesday at Aunt Judy's Attic and Judy gave a really neat demonstration on how to make easy squares for a Chevron quilt. The technique was so easy and I really liked the look of the quilt she did, so I thought I would scale it down a little and do an orange, blue, and gray chevron puff quilt. 

Here was my layout before I turned them into puffs:

Sewing the puffs (with the help of the Mini-Mowers in preparation for the video announcement):

And then finally the finished blanket. It's small, but that's what I wanted. These aren't really blankets that you wrap up a baby in...more ones that you set the baby on, so it doesn't need to be huge. 

I did raw edges on the bottom and was so excited to pull it out of the washer and see the cute chevron top and the frayed edges on the bottom squares...only to find my washer hated my blanket. It tore some of the fabrics, popped seams, and turned some of the grays into weird shades. I re-stuffed the popped seams and then I hand stitched all the tears back, but now there are funny gathers in places and I'm a little bummed out. Hopefully when it actually gets used and I have to wash spit up and other bodily fluids off of it, the machine won't take out its anger on the blanket again.