Run, run, run as fast as you can

Tis the season for sharing your favorite cookies with family and friends.  This year, instead of a plate of cookies I've made fabric cookie buckets.  I came across the cookie bucket idea online a few years ago, but when I saw gingerbread man fabric in the guild "Trash or Treasure" tote, I knew this would be this years project.  The Trash to Treasure tote is where fabric that a guild member didn't want or was left over from one of their projects is donated.  Instead of trashing it in the garbage it is placed in this tote for another member to make a treasure.

The fabric I found has the verse of the Gingerbread Man - "run, run, run as fast as you can".  The buckets have fabric handles that are attached with buttons.  I couldn't believe that I came across Gingerbread Man buttons.  The binding looks like the stripes on candy canes.  What a great touch.

Normally, I run out of time to add projects to make during the Christmas season.  This year I am ahead of the game, I made them this week leaving plenty of time to bake goodies to fill them.   Here are my 8 cookie buckets waiting to be filled.

The gingerbread man buttons are adorable.  I certainly will have to make gingerbread man cookies to include with our family favorites - peanut butter goof balls and sugar cookies with buttercream frosting. My daughter calls my sugar cookies "crack cookies".  She claims you can't eat just one, they are addictive.  My husband makes venison sausage - maybe he'll make enough to add to these buckets.  I'm adding my homemade sour cherry jam and grandma's recipe for fudge too.  Boy, at this rate I hope the buckets are big enough.   Fa la la la la.

Something wicked

Still repurposing, I used part of green panty hose from my Halloween costume to make a soft-sculpture witch head wallhanging.  I made a similar witch head with regular skin colored panty hose back in the 90s.  But, over time it looked pretty beat up.  It was time for a new witch. 

I stuffed a piece of the green panty hose and sewed a few details to sculpt the face.  I painted the eyes and mouth, used grey yarn for the hair and made a hat sewn from felt. Her head is about 20 inches long.   Mounted on a short broom, she came together perfectly.  I have young grandchildren, so she's not too scary, but sort of a whimsical and fun.  I think they'll enjoy her every Halloween.

The movie Wicked just came out.  Although I wasn't inspired to make a green witch by this movie, it just happened to come out about the same time.  I did read the book series and today went to the show to see it.  I'm not much on musicals, but I really enjoyed it and can't wait for the next chapter.

Repurposing with a purpose

I have a wonderful family and friends, that are so supportive.  They know that I'm always repurposing, recycling or repairing things. So donations are always offered to me.  Very seldom do I decline these donations.  It gives me great satisfaction to avoid being so disposal and find new uses for them.  Over the last few years I've accumulated odds and ends that would have ended up in the landfill.

At the AuSable Quilt Guild we started an Idea Challenge Jar.  Members of the guild were asked to write an idea on a piece of paper to put into our jar.  The idea could be a color, an object, a technique, a quilt block, but not limited to these few suggestions.  How the idea is interpreted is up to each member - there is no wrong or right way to execute this idea.  During our September meeting we deposited our ideas in this jar.  October we picked our first challenge - "repurpose".  I have to say this was not my idea, but it certainly excited me to hunt through my donation stash and see what I could do.  I found blue jeans, sweaters, and many other miscellaneous items.  This is great incentive to clear out some of my donation stash.

First, I have a couple sweater jackets from my daughter.  They have several different prints and it will be fun to mix and match pieces from these sweaters to make mittens.

I have a few more pieces left, but not enough for a full pair of mittens.  I'll have to search for one more sweater to finish piecing a pair of mittens.  I wonder if she'll recognize her sweater when she sees these mittens.

Next, I had some leftover rubber shelf liner.  With that I repurposed it into jar lid openers.  It is a quick and easy project and I tested one,  they really work!  I will be making more as Christmas stocking stuffers.

I feed birds all year long.  I have quite a variety that visit my feeders.  There are so many birds that I fill my feeders up daily.  The bags of black sunflower seeds have great pictures of birds and flowers on them.  Recently, my husband has been purchasing sunflower seed bags that have large yellow sunflowers with bees on them.  We gone through a few bags and each time we throw them out I' was tempted to keep it to repurpose.  Well, with this repurposing challenge I decided I needed to make a tote from one of these bags.  It's sturdy and will be great hauling my groceries.

I've cleaned through some of my stash, but have a few more projects I'll tackle.

A log cabin basket

Several years ago I came across a picture of a wallhanging basket.  The basket was constructed with the log cabin block.  Being a basket weaver I knew immediately I wanted to make a similar basket wallhanging, so I stashed a copy of that picture with my want-to-do list.

With the recent quilt guild challenge of making a scrappy log cabin quilt, I was inspired to tackle this wallhanging and check it off my UFO list.  This was the first time I made a log cabin block that has an arch to it.  I figured out the assembly of the basket rather quickly.  Next, I had to decide what I wanted in that basket.  The inspirational picture had twigs with small red berries.  I pondered what I would prefer.  It came down to pussy willow branches, violets or lavender.  After a few weeks lavender won.  I grow lavender and love the smell, it is so relaxing.

I drew up an idea of how I wanted the lavender to look and got busy hand embroidering.  I must admit what I embroidered looks bushier than what I grow, so maybe this will inspire me for my future garden.

I'm on a mission and seem to have a few small projects to work on.  My goal is to get them completed before the new year.  I'll be back soon!  

Rainbows and Unicorns

Another young family just had a baby girl.  The father is a great friend to my eldest son and our family.  In fact, he was born in the same hospital just a couple days before my son was born.  The boys spent time in the hospital nursery together.  So I was very excited to gift a quilt to this new family.

With the left-over fabrics I made a cloth toy tote carrier, a couple burp cloths and added some other goodies.

The newborn, named Evergreen Marie, is just a little one weighing six pounds.  It will take her a bit to grow into this quilt I made her measuring 43" by 52".  With winter on the horizon I'm sending warmth and hugs.  I'm so happy for their new beginnings.

Sending hugs and warmth

Back in January the education committee from the AuSable Quilt Guild challenged its members to a jellyroll race quilt (note we weren't actually racing to make it,  just using the construction design).  Since most of the members are well-seasoned quilters, if they've already made this style quilt or have no desire to make one, they were offered the opportunity to make one as a charity quilt for the local Foster Kids Program.    These quilts would be handed out to children as they were removed from their homes and placed in a new environment.  The education committee even offered a twist on the race with the spinner design.  

I tackled this project head on.  I made my own jellyroll strips from my stash fabric and purchased new fabric to fill in.  It was fun to see the fabrics randomly move around as they were sewn together.  A jellyroll race quilt finishes approximately 50" by 64".  

So I made my first quilt and it went together in a snap.  Knowing it was going to a great cause and more fabric on hand I made a second quilt.  A great friend came to visit and I quilted her newly made quilt and she loved the idea of donating to the Foster Kids Program so she handed me cash to buy more fabric.  Well, that became quilt number three and four.  But wait,  I now have more leftover fabric so I went and bought more fabric to use it up, hence quilt number five and six.  A few months later my friend came to visit again and again left cash to make more quilts.  With our combined contributions came quilt seven and eight.  If my friend didn't live so far away I'm sure we would have sewn more quilts together, but eight is a number we both are proud of.

Here is the group of all eight quilts.

The above quilts were made in the traditional jellyroll race style using straight edge joining and mitered edge joining.

These three quilts were made with a twist called the spinner.  It uses the same concept as the jellyroll race, but a group of random strips are cut at an angle and resewn together for the center spin.

Last but not least, this quilt was made from flannel.  I had leftover precut squares that were 7" so I incorporated them randomly into this quilt.

Thanks to the partnership of a great friend, we both send love, hugs and warmth to these kids and hope for a good future.  A message to these kids - know that there are many people who care about you.

 

From the hearth of the home

All the leaves are brown and the sky is gray.  We've had a wonderful fall, but winters on its way.  That's part of a song that comes into my head as I finished my scrappy log cabin quilt.  (I took the liberty to change a couple words :)

The first scrappy quilt I made was this same scrappy log cabin.  I posted about that quilt in March 2019.  Of all the quilts I've made everyone always picked that quilt as their favorite. In fact, my friend who made the same scrappy quilt said that she was told the same.

 As I've mentioned in previous posts, I'm the Education Director for the AuSable Quilt Guild.  The guild has been donating their scraps throughout the year to our Trash to Treasures tote.  The tote actually got pretty full.  In August the education committee announced that the totes fabrics would be cut into 1 1/2" strips for our last challenge of their calendar year.  Each guild participant had to contribute one yard each of dark and light colored cotton fabrics to be mixed with the tote fabrics.  The fabric would be redistributed to participants to make a lap size scrappy log cabin.  We had 20 participants.  They had two months to work on their creation (or longer if they needed it).  The fun part comes when you decide to lay the blocks out, there are so many different layouts.  As of this posting there have been quite a few quilts that have been finished and shared during our Show and Tell.  All of them were laid out different and were absolutely awesome.  It's a little addictive that I want to make another so I can try a different layout.

My original scrappy log cabin was gifted to Charlie who admired my piles of quilts and picked it as his favorite.  So I made another scrappy log cabin with the diamond layout.  Instead of a lap quilt I did make it large enough for a queen bed, but to accommodate the. design my finished size is 80" by 100".

Being on the education committee I've made the effort to learn some history on the blocks/quilts I've made and share with my fellow quilters.  The history I find always surprises me.  Here is some history on the log cabin quilt block that I found online (What di we do before computers):  

This style of quilt is called “Log Cabin” because of the pattern. It is made with a central shape, such as a square or a diamond, in the middle. This represents the hearth or fireplace, which is a place of warmth and activity in a log cabin. The early pioneer settler home, the log cabin, became an iconic symbol of the taming of the wild frontier and for achieving the American Dream. The log cabin symbol was so popular, a quilt style was named after it.  Quilt historians found that the Log Cabin design became popular in 1863, when the Union Army was raising money for the Civil War by raffling quilts. President Abraham Lincoln grew up in a log cabin so the pattern may have been a symbol of loyalty to him as head of the Union. 

A red center square was thought to symbolize the hearth of the home, a yellow center was believed to represent a welcoming light shining through the window.  During the Civil War a log cabin block with a black center hanging on a clothesline was meant to sign a stop for the Underground Railroad. 

In the latter part of the 19th century the block became very popular as our nation was nearing the centennial in 1876.  Many Log Cabin quilts were made using fabric scraps that were popular during that time including silk, velvet, wool, and satin.

Earlier sources for the log cabin inspiration goes as far back as Egyptian mummy wrappings with the well known design of rectangular “logs” laid in a square pattern.

My first scrappy log cabin had no rhyme or reason for the center blocks.  The instructor for that class  I took did not offer any information about the center.  I just picked what I thought looked good.  This recent Log cabin does have a red center to represent the hearth of the home.

This was a fun quilt and a great way to use up miscellaneous fabrics from my stash and scraps.  I have another smaller log cabin project I'm almost finished with.  I'll be posting about it soon. So now that the skies are gray I'm heading back to my sewing studio.