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

A Marxist gingerbread man

The end of the week and weekend so far has not been a very productive studying week for me. I started out with great hopes that I would slay the academic dragon this weekend, as well as make progress on my christmas quilt, but unfortunately that has not materialized.

I bought some great fabric on Thursday. I can't wait to use it and see the different blocks I have planned take shape in my quilt.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending time with my sister, step-mom, step-sister and my amazing nephews! They are only 2 months apart, so it was a baby afternoon. It was a great change of pace and a nice reminder that there is more to life than school.

On my way home, I knew that I would have to work all night to catch up on school work, but after dinner when It came time to sit down and read yet another article that uses marxist theory, I decided to push it off until today and let Future Viv handle it. So I sat down at my machine and started piecing together my first gingerbread man.

He turned out great but he is a lot smaller than what i had planned, so I will have to adjust my design for the finished quilt, using some filler squares. More on that when I have time to sketch it out. The pattern for Mr Cookie comes from Lori Holt and is part of an instagram sew along calls #haveyourselfaquiltylittlechristmas. She has many great patterns, here is her blog

I was tired and a little irritable while piecing him, probably an indication that my sewing time was not for relaxing but for procrastination. And so, with every stitch my anxiety over getting my work done increased. And yet when he was all done, I could not bring myself to go to bed early. Instead, I watched videos about free motion quilting and looked up pretty quilting patterns on Pinterest.

So, this morning, Future Viv woke up, she was not impressed with Yesterday Viv's procrastination to say the least. I am at Starbucks, trying to catch up on reading, while the midterm papers I have to grade are weighing heavily on my mind.

Funnily enough, I am reading an article that argues among other things that School is an Ideological State Apparatus that indoctrinates young impressionable children into the ruling ideology in order to reproduce the material means of production.  I am beginning to vaguely understand what this means, which is progress for me. But I find it ironic that this article is in my reading list this week as I am struggling so much with the whole school system.

That's it for now. Not such a fun post, but at least you know where I'm at.

Vivianna

Relaxing Christmas Quilting

This has been a crazy, exciting and wonderful week! My twin sister gave birth to a beautiful son! I am an aunt for the first time!!! Amidst this wonderful news, I also had a presentation to prepare for on Wednesday and a conference to attend on Friday. It was a busy week filled with trips back and forth between Montreal and Ottawa. By Saturday morning I was completely exhausted and ready to relax a bit. What better way than with a little bit of quilting?

Ever since I started quilting, I have wanted to make a Christmas quilt. The holidays can be such a fun time to be with family and celebrate traditions. With the birth of my beautiful nephew, I can only hope that this quilt will come to represent fun holiday traditions and family time. So, this weekend I started my first Christmas quilt and I’m excited to share the process with you!

Photo from original pattern

My inspiration started with this Christmas tree block, it’s so cute and easy; you can find the pattern here.

I purchased the Christmas fabrics I used from Walmart. I had heard that the store carried some fabric, but had never explored that option. I went this week and was surprised to find they had a good selection. It may not be the finest quality fabric that you can purchase from a quilting shop and some may have serious objections to that, but I think that broader tradition of quilting is about working with what you have. If you have beautiful expensive fabrics, that’s wonderful, and maybe your quilt will stay nicer for longer, but less expensive fabrics can also produce great quilts.

So, while I was watching this weeks episode of How To Get Away With Murder, very interesting developments I have to say, I started cutting my fabric. The pattern calls for mainly strips and squares, which is one of the reasons this block is so easy. There are no triangles! 

Here are the trees all cut and ready to sew, it was very easy to get to the process. The red one on the right has all the cream pieces that will be make up the background of the tree. 

This pattern calls for drawing a diagonal line along 8 of the cream squares that are matched up on each of the tree strips. It is a kind of tedious process, but it makes assembly much faster and so its absolutely worth it.

Of course, my friend Mr. Seam Ripper wanted to get in on the action. I accidentally sewed the tree stump to the wrong side of the tree!! Irritating, but no quilting project is complete without the seam ripper!

Mid-assembly, you can already tell that it's going to be a cute christmas tree!

                     

Here are my trees all finished! I really like how they turned out. I can see my quilt coming together nicely with other fabrics and maybe another block or two mixed in, maybe a star, well see how it goes. I doubt I'll have time to finish this before christmas, but its certainly a step in the right direction! What do you think so far?

Some tips for this pattern:

Choosing the right foot for the job

As I started quilting more, I bought a quilting foot for my sewing machine that has a 1/4 inch guide. It is perfect for certain jobs since it ensure perfect seams. but for others like sewing a diagonal line, my traditional foot is much better.  

The photo with the red fabric has the the regular foot, it works for all types of sewing. The photo with the cream fabric has the quilting foot with the guide. 

Chain piecing

I have found that whenever possible it is so much better to use chain piecing as a technique. The technique calls for sewing each piece right after the other without cutting the thread in between. If you look at the photo on the left above, you will see there is another square right behind the one I am sewing, this is chain piecing. It is much faster and saves a lot of thread! On the right here you will see the 4 pieces I sewed using the chain piecing technique.