Quilt Guild Saturday Sew Day

Every so often, the quilt guild I'm a part of holds a Saturday sew day where a bunch of us get together on a Saturday, learn a fun and quick quilt pattern, and sew quilts for our charity quilt project.  Last year, the guild made and donated 130+ quilts.  It's been really fun being a part of this.

This past Saturday was another Saturday sew day and one that I was actually able to attend.  I knew ahead of time what the pattern was going to be and since my tastes in fabric can be quite different from most of the guild members (I'm 20+ years younger than most of the members), I decided to pull out some fabric from my stash to use.  I had a pile of navy and white strips that I had won as part of Hawthorne Threads weekly #htwipit contest on Instagram a while ago that seemed just perfect for this quilt.

It ended up being a very successful are day for me.  What started as a pile of strips at 9 in the morning ended as a completed quilted (top done, quilted and bound!) by 2:30 that afternoon!  I really do love my new Juki TL2000Qi sewing machine - it churns out a quilt faster than anything!

Hopefully this little quilt will bring comfort to someone going through a difficult life experience.  

Rope Bowls on the Mind

Way back in August, I started to see rope bowls popping up in my Instagram feed.  They looked so fun to make and I really wanted to give them a try.

Well, sewing for craft shows and then sewing for Christmas kind of took priority for a while.

Finally, last weekend, I decided to give this whole rope bowl thing a try.  Oh my - are they ever addicting!  So much fun, they use up the itty bitty string scraps of fabric, the possibilities are endless as to size and how they look.

 I'm definitely not done making them and as I want a few more for myself, they make fantastically fun gifts and I'll be stocking some in my Etsy shop and for an upcoming craft show in April.

Oh and before you ask, I used this great tutorial by Tia Curtis to get me started.

Linking up with Crazy Mom Quilts for Finish it up Friday.  

Some New Bunnies in the Works

Just checking in for WIP Wednesday (linking up with Lee over at Freshly Pieced).
I don't always have good work in progress stuff to share, but today I actually do!  Yesterday morning, I was finishing up a few things to send to my sister for her baby shower this weekend and I just had to make a cute little lovie to add to the box.  I decided to try my hand at drafting a bunny pattern pulling together several sources of inspiration.  This is the first one I made:

With a jingle noise maker inside, softly stuffed, soft velvety minky on the backside, and the sweetest faux fur pom pom trail, this bunny turned out really really cute!  Squeal worthy really. ;)
Since it turned out so cute, I decided to tweak my pattern a bit (always striving for cuteness perfection) and make up some of these for my Etsy shop.  I managed to make another prototype yesterday evening which turned out even better:

My husband was right - the face makes it even cuter!  My youngest saw him sitting on my ironing board this morning and has thoroughly claimed him as his own.

I think I need to make one more pattern tweak and then it'll be mass production time.  Stay tuned for more of these to show up around here.