A little of this and a little of that...

I have been neglecting this space lately, and have no real excuse for it except that there are many things higher on the list right now!  I am retiring from teaching in 5 days, which is just amazing, but comes with lots of work!  I have to clean out my classroom and, of course, there are gifts to be given which I am busily sewing away at.

But first... I won a giveaway on the May Great Big Giveaway Day through Faith at Fresh Lemons and Shabby Fabrics!  So fun!!

These Bali Pops are called "Sea Glass."  Aren't they pretty?  I am going to enjoy figuring out something to do with them!  Thank you Faith and Shabby Fabrics!

My lovely, quilty friends in my quilt group surprised me with this fun box full of fat quarters as a retirement gift:

What a special treat, and so unexpected!

And my sewing this week has consisted of finishing this table runner for my teaching partner.  It is made of strips of Gleeful from Art Gallery Fabrics and done in a "quilt as you go" technique.

I did have fun adding some decorative stitching to the top on every other strip or so.

For one last gift for a fellow retiree, I am making my favorite reversible cloth napkins from this tutorial.  I love giving gifts that are useful! You can make 2 napkins out of 2 fat quarters, so I'm going to make my friend two more out of some other coordinating fat quarters.  I hope she likes them!

I will be absent from my blog again for awhile because we are celebrating my retirement with a trip the day after school gets out, but I will keep tabs on all of the scrappy goings-on through the Oh Scrap! link-up while I am gone!

Have a great week everyone!

Diann

QAYG and a Giveaway!

Happy Mother's Day to all of you moms out there!  Here was the view out my backdoor this morning:

Yes, that is snow!  And if you look closely, you can see a sheen of ice on the fountain, too... I guess I won't be planting flowers in my yard, which is my usual tradition on Mother's Day! It does make for a good sewing day, however!

Inspired by posts I read this week from Svetlana at s.o.t.a.k. handmade and Amy at Diary of a Quilter, I decided to play around with some quilt as you go techniques and out of it came this pouch:

Front and back views. It is made out of a panel from my Charley Harper bird fabric.  I made a slab from pieces of the panel and some strips of navy and white Gleeful that I've had in my stash.  Then I cut the slab apart to make the front and back.

The inside comes from a fat quarter of Comma.

This was the first time I've tried making a pouch without any directions.  Since I've made a few in the last year or so, I thought it would be a cinch!  (Ha!)  After sewing the zipper in backwards, and then sewing the whole thing closed without a way to turn everything right side out, I decided I will not be so self-assured next time!

While looking for an idea for an end of the year gift for one of my teaching partners, I found a tutorial for an easy quilt as you go table runner on Amy's blog, and decided to give it a try.  I am using the rest of my fat quarter bundle of Gleeful for this project for a fresh, happy, and spring-y look.  So far, here is how it looks:

The top is made from 2 1/2 inch strips, and the back is pieced from some larger pieces.  I am hoping it will kind of be reversible!  I have plenty of the 2 1/2 inch strips left for the binding, too.

And finally, to celebrate my 101st post of last week, an inspiration from a comment left by Lara at BuzzinBumble!  I'm going to have my first giveaway, a small bundle of 6 fat quarter dot fabrics, an homage to the 101 Dalmatians, and my most recent fabric obsession!

If you would enjoy having this little bundle, leave me a comment, and I will choose a winner this coming Thursday, May 14th! 

Have a great week, everyone!

Pushing Along

There hasn't been much scrap play in my sewing room this week, but I have been on a big push to finish the quilting on my Winter in the Woods quilt.  It is going pretty slowly, probably because I am quilting it pretty densely (for me!) in organic wavy lines, but I am making progress.

See those lovely purple gloves?  They are gardening gloves with a coating of nitrile that I bought at Lowes! My Machingers quilting gloves got so dirty on the fingertips that I had to get rid of them, and I saw something about trying gardening gloves like these posted in Pat Sloan's quilting Facebook group.  They work great, are inexpensive (I think I got 3 pair for about $5), and there is the added bonus that they are purple!

I did have to take a break at one point and try something new and different.  This is a Triangle Zipper Pouch from the blog of Vanessa at The Crafty Gemini.  Isn't it cute?

All it takes is 2 - 5 x 10 inch pieces of fabric, a little bit of fusible fleece, and a zipper, and it goes together in about half an hour!  So fun!  I can see more of these in my future!

I just noticed that this is my 101st post!  I totally missed that I had come that far.  This must mean I need to have some kind of celebration.  Stay tuned!