Happy New Year 2016

Happy New year to you all!

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, mine was a little flat as I was a little bit off colour for some reason between Christmas Eve to probably New Year's Eve, had a bit of a temperature, aching legs and I slept way too much. Now that the tree is down and the decorations stored I now feel ready to get back to normal!

I had great plans to finish up lots of small projects over the holidays but in actual fact, all I did was sew a button on my DH's jacket, finished sewing the binding on this utility quilt and made a cover for my new stand mixer, not really what I had in mind.

Double sectioned pocket on the back...

Big single pocket on the front...

Like everyone else the run up to Christmas was a little hectic, I shipped off some lovely boxes of my hand made soaps to customers, the traditional tartan boxes were much appreciated.

I managed to get all of my promised quilts finished and even got a couple of quilts ahead...

Surf on a lovely 'half hexie' baby quilt

Jessie's Swirls on a jelly roll type quilt.

Freemotion hand guided quilting of feathers and swirls on this lovely diagonal fourpatch quilt

This modern Christmas quilt is a kit from the US, little panels and four patches with a border of trees with scarves, it's very busy. Not a lot was going to show on the front, as the busy backing fabric was a little short, with Anna's permission I chose a matching red solid for the back which really did show off the quilting.

Last year I took part in a small online swap with a few 'would be' digitisers, we each designed a snowflake, sent our design to Kari who then made all of the designs available to all of the participants. This is the first quilt since then that I could have used the snowflakes on, the back really showed them off.

I designed another wreath of Christmas lights with baubles and alternated this block between the snowflakes

I quilted swirls in the sashings and roughly outlined the tree trunks to take in a bit of fullness and quilted a big freestyle holly and ribbon wreath around the whole border....

This green Hexie quilt was specially made by Maria as a gift for a new baby whose room had green leaves on the walls, I was asked to quilt leaves and Witchery symbols.

I freemotion quilted a freestyle leaf border and various symbols including stars, suns, moons, hearts, a hatchet for protection, swirls for energy, etc, etc. I was also asked to do a full binding on this quilt, this is the quilt featured in the binding tutorial at the top of this page....at present I only offer a half binding service to my clients. This quilt has already been delivered as the baby is already here, in Denmark....

Remember this quilt, I showed it back in April, I bought the top in a Thrift store in Paducah, Kentucky. The first photo shows it as a quilt top pictured in the house of Gayle Kaler, (Lady Mayoress of Paducah), where we stayed during our visit. It looked like it had been washed as the edges were a little tattered so I trimmed them straight. I chose a digitized design synonymous with Paducah, 'Dogwoods' by Anne Bright Designs.

It's a perfect souvenir of my trip to Paducah this year, it was great to reflect and remember happy times while sewing down the binding.

Does anyone know the name of this block?

Thank you to Mereth and Annie for naming the block, it's a Texas Star....

I know there are customer quilts still on my SD card that I haven't shown yet, when I come across them I will insert them in future posts, as time allows...

OK, now back to work!