Happy New Year!! This blog will either be really long or short and picture heavy one of the two. I promised you some pictures of items from the Stocking Swap so we will start with that. These are just a few of the items I received. I love this pillow cover. I have stuffed a 14" pillow form inside and it is fantastic!! It's very bohemian and is so my style. There is also a pincushion you will see in the next picture. This is just strips of fabric sewn down the middle and randomly placed so the edges of the fabric are left loose and flappy. (bad description, but truly that is how it is) The little balls are fabric stuffed with fiberfill and then sewn around the ends and sewn onto the edge of the pillow cover and pin cushion.
The bag part of the Swap was a jewelry bag that gathers up to create a flower. Here it is all gathered
Here it is opened up. The edges of the inside fabric creates little pockets to store your jewelry plus being able to store it in the center section. In the background you can see my new pink television! I love it!! On the screen is Ellen and her look back at Robin Williams' appearances on her show and how he made her laugh every time he came on. It was a touching look back and very, very funny. I was laughing at him and at her. At one point she was almost curled up in the fetal position laughing so hard at what he was saying. Anyway, I really love my new pink television. My "gift" to myself this holiday.
Every year Victoria of Bumble Beans and 15 Minutes Play chooses a word and makes it her word for the year. Every year I would say, "I am going to do that" and then not follow through until last year when I chose the word "Social". I worked at being more social almost the entire of last year. This year I have chosen the word "Create". I plan on creating many new things in the coming year, not just with fabric and quilting, but with paint and food and many, many other things. I want to bring out more of this side of me. Being creative makes me happy. So, for the new year, I have made my new word quilt hanging. I pieced the letters this year instead of appliqueing. I really should have used Tonya's book (she hasn't blogged in a really long time, but I just wanted to reference her blog here) and my letters may have been a little bit better, but I think they turned out okay for my first try at a word. I love this background fabric and had picked up a few fat quarters for cheap (less than a dollar each) when a store was going out of business and knew that I wanted to use it as my background fabric. That meant the other colors needed to stand out a bit since that was a busy print.
Along with the pink fabric, I picked up a couple of this blue/green floral fabric in fat quarters, also. This would be just right for the borders and I could pull the colors for the letters from this print. Here it was on the wall last night when I went to bed.
Today, I knew my mission was to get this quilted and bound and finished. The quilting isn't the best - that is one of the things I need to work on this year in my year of "creating", but I like it "warts and all" as they say. I used the pink to bind it and bring that color out to the edges and I loved how the little pig on the shelf is looking around the edge of the quilt. I used a blue/green thread to do the circles and swirls on the outside and black thread to go around all the letters since they definitely needed an outline of black to stand out. Now the only thing to do is make a label and a hanging sleeve - forgot about that until now - and it is ready to put up on the wall.
What is your word for the year?
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