A New Year a New Project, But First…

Seriously, the holidays are a wonderful time, but I’m itching to get back to sewing and writing. It seems I have been consumed with decorating the house, cooking, shopping & wrapping, attending gatherings with family and friends, and then the sad part of breaking it all down and packing it away for another year.

Somewhere in there between Thanksgiving and New Years, I did manage to complete a few projects though, and I need to tell you about them. What have I been up to? Well, mostly tatting, felting, and quilting.

Back in November, I showed you the tatted wreaths that I intended to give away as party favors at our annual holiday party. Well I ended up making wreaths, snowflakes, and icicles (a basic josephine knot with beads). These are exceptionally bad photos because you can’t see any of the detail in the tatting – I’m going to have to figure out how to do better close-ups with my digital camera soon – but they might give you an idea of what is possible for a novice tatter (me).

The felting projects include a chair pad for my office chair, some decorative bowls, and flowers (haven’t decided what to do with those yet). Tomorrow I’ll give you detailed instructions on the felted projects.

As for the quilting, the big project was the wall hanging I turned into a table topper. This dining room table is always piled high with food for our annual holiday party, and I wanted to do something special to decorate the room. As you can see, I have a glass top for this table, and normally I just place a cream colored tablecloth under the glass for the party. This year it occurred to me to us a quilt instead.

I would give you the directions for this but frankly, the design was very closely inspired by a photo on a flyer I received in the mail. I did work out the quilting math on my own to fit my table top, but still feel that I should give credit to the original designer. Unfortunately I can’t find the flyer anywhere, so have no idea who to credit. If anyone recognizes the design, please post a comment, and if you are the designer and want me to provide a link to your pattern, I will be happy to do so.

Anyway, now you know why I was making all of those placemats to practice machine quilting. The star and tree on this quilt are quilted in-the-ditch, and the light colored background is stippled.

I also made a holiday camel ornament for a friend’s party. The theme of the party was “how dry I am” since Georgia has experienced record drought in 2007. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture before I gave it to her. Imagine this guy made out of Sculpey® polymer clay (the stuff you shape and then bake in the oven) and painted gold. He's about three inches across (in your imagination silly). Then imagine a little red and green tatted blanket on his back made out of metallic thread, and a halter made of the same thread. The whole thing was then affixed inside a copper wire hoop (had to learn how to solder for that one), and hung by another hank of metallic thread looped at the top of the copper hoop.

Well that’s a quick update on what I’ve been up to. How about you? Post a comment and let us hear from you. I’m happy to answer questions, or point readers to your own website if you have something to share.