The last several days of the Advent Calendar gifties have consisted of a good mix of notions and project ideas. Along with the Parking sign, there was a small embroidery project. Neither one is really my thing, but my daugher-in-law suggested that a little duck in a charm for a necklace for my granddaughter would probably be well received. A great idea, and I'll wait til next year to make that up. the charm is tiny, about an inch in diameter.
There was a button jar, to include a little yellow duck button (the company mascot) with directions to make a pincushion top for the jar. Using one of the unused squares from the charm pack from Day 3.
The next day featured some blue fabric and a pattern for this snowflake pillow, using the buttons in the button jar.
Yesterday's giftie was a needle threader and needles. Haha, they should have got someone to make a needle threader with a duck.
Today's giftie is a stashbuilding yard of white on white fabric and a couple spools of cotton thread.
Personally speaking, I may not use everything in the Missouri Star Advent Calendar box, but whoever put this together put a lot of thought into choosing useful items and fun projects. I have already decided to do this again next year.
The Cozy Cup mini top plus one mug rug is complete. I still have to add the side borders to the other two mug rugs.
Whoever designed this quilt did an odd thing with the sashing between the rows. The directions had you add a narrow 1/2" strip to the top and bottom of each cup and snowflake. After I had the top together, I realized it would have been easier, faster and less wasteful to omit the strips on the top and bottom of the cups and just use a wider piece for the sashing. No idea what they were thinking. This would make a great giftie for someone, so it's likely I'll make another; and I'll make the adjustment for the sashing.
Before I can get these items quilted up, I need to finish the quilt on the frame and get some bowl cozies made.
Anything that is not quilting is what I call utility sewing, and mostly I don't like to do it. Only occasionally will I make household items like curtains, a tote bag, or anything like that. I did, however, offer to make 4 small and 4 large bowl cozies for my kids, to use up a LOT of yardage of vegetable fabric I acquired at a very cheap price. Why so much? Because I thought I might use it for adult cover ups (bibs), only my quilt chapter never worked on that again as a group project.
So naturally I'm going to use every shortcut I can come up with to make this kind of sewing as painless as possible, so I bought precut bowl cozy batting from Gypsy Quilter. Turns out Creative Grids got together with Gypsy Quilter and made a set of 2 bowl cozy templates which are the same size as Gypsy Quilters batting, which will make it faster to cut out the fabric and more batting. Brilliant!
I made a set of two bowl cozies long enough ago that I forgot some of the little improvements I made to the method, which I remembered after I had most of the first one together last night.
As I was getting ready to topstitch the outside of it, I realized I had no idea whether my thread was all cotton or a cotton/poly blend, which could be flammable in the microwave. I still have some of the Coats & Clark blends that I am using up, so it very well could have been one of those. So I wound up taking it all back apart, ripping the thread out of the one half, and today I'll put it all back together with the proper thread. I can also include some of those method improvements too.
One side of my bowl cozies is yellow onions, and the other side is red bell peppers. Once I get the first one together, I figure I can put three more together assembly line fashion, to limit how many times I have to change the thread colors.
Those are great gifts and well thought out, like every gift seems to be a completion of another gift or project. So cool. Maybe Cozy Cup has a narrow border because of the quilting design? Does the pattern come with one? Or maybe it represents the shelf? I'm just thinking out loud here. I love it anyway. It looks great! I should try and make some cozy bowls for myself. I have one gifted to me and I love it. It's at work because that's where I use the microwave most often. Like you, if it's not a quilt it is less tempting to start. Have a great evening! ;^)
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