Final papers and Christmas sewing

I made it through the first semester of my PhD. It was quite a ride. The month of December has flown by with papers to write, grading to complete, exams to proctor and gifts to sew! Some days I didn't sleep very much but I got it all done!

My friends and I had a wonderful Christmas dinner on the 14th of December. It was our first time hosting Christmas in our new house! In preparation, I did a little Christmas crafting; I made a holiday felt garland.

All it took was some pinking shears lots of felt and some time!

Here is a close up of the garland.The technique is really simple! I sewed down the centre each circle. I let 4 stitches go in between each circle to give them some space, they hang better that way. 

 I used painters tape to mark the space for the circles so the stitching would be more of less in the middle. 

Here it is installed in my dinning area. Later on I added some Christmas lights to give it extra Christmas flair and it looks great!

After our christmas dinner we had a gift exchange. I was secret Santa to my friend Theresa and made her 3 open wide zipper pouches (tutorial here). I wanted them to be really personalized so I added pieced tops to make each one unique. 

Macbook for scale ;)

Here is the detail on the medium bag, I used a lot of scraps here,it kind of felt like doodling with fabric

Mini flying geese for the smallest bag

I tried my hand at making printed labels with great success, here is the biggest bag with the label ready to sew. I'll have more on the labels in a future post, but let me just say sewing them on after the bags were completed was not the best idea. I ended up having to open up the lining to make it easier. Save yourself the headache, plan ahead and sew them to the lining before assembly!!

All three bags with their labels ready to be sewn.

The bags were a great success, Theresa loved them! What do you think?

Happy holidays everyone

Vivianna