Blog / christmas gift

Back during Scrap Buster Month on Sew Mama Sew!, I fell in love with this quilt by Rita of Red Pepper Quilts. Knowing that I wanted to make my parents a quilt for Christmas, I decided to use her easy-to-follow tutorial.

I chose to keep the colors for the lap quilt simple, and used shades of blue for each border. The blues were a combination of scraps from around the studio, and fat quarters that I...

As a Christmas gift for two little girls in our family, I decided to embroider their initials using some of the skills I've picked up from reading Jenny Hart's Embroidered Effects.

Using a stencil, I traced each initial onto a piece of fabric and embroidered it using a simple split stitch. 

As a Christmas gift for my parents-in-law, I made a quilted table runner, similar in design to the baby quilt I made in October.

All of the fabrics I used were ones I already had on my studio's shelves, and, thankfully, fit the color scheme of my relatives' home.

For the binding, I used the green ribbon left over from all of our Pottery Barn wedding gifts.

On the back, I included a strip of ribbon, which I embroidered with the recipients' names and a greeting.

Happy New Year! I'm finally back from a week-long vacation filled with movie watching, fabric sorting, crafting, and quilting by a fire (temperatures were below zero in Vermont!). I was excited--and lucky--to receive lots of crafty gifts for Christmas (which I'll post soon), though the yards and yards of fabric given to me by my mom and aunt (including some amazing vintage quilting fabrics, from the 1930s and 1940s) were among my favorites.

These star ornaments were one of the gifts that I gave this year. Following this tutorial (which was part of Sew Mama Sew's Scrap Buster Contest back in October), I made each star from remnants of Japanese fabric, scraps of ribbon, and buttons.

More gift posts to follow!