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When I was a kid, I made simple friendship bracelets by braiding three strands of floss. I always envied the girls with thicker, more colorful bracelets and I remember trying to learn how to make them, but never meeting anyone with the patience to really teach me. I forgot about them until I saw this post about friendship bracelets on the Purl Bee. The link contains great photos and step-by-step instructions. Man, I wish I had the internet when I was coming up!

As usual, I think I messed up every single step possible.

Mistake 1.

I went to City Quilter to buy a few colors of embroidery floss and only saw these beautiful hand-dyed colors.

They are beautiful, made in America, and use environmentally friendly dyes, but they are also double the price of regular floss.

I am all about paying more for better quality and supporting smaller businesses, but not the first time I’m making a new project. If I looked six inches to the left, I would’ve seen drawers and drawers of cheaper floss which would’ve made much more sense to practice on. I wish I saved these fancy flosses for an actual friend.

Indy, as always, was helpful.

Mistake 2.

I have no idea how to tie a slip knot. I watched many a youtube video on it, but still had to do it four or five times until it was centered and small enough.

Mistake 3.

For some reason, I imagined it would take me 15 minutes to tie these knots and finish this bracelet. It took more than three hours mostly because of Mistake #4.

Mistake 4.

I tried to keep all the colors laid out flat and pulled tight as I made the knots, but somewhere along the line, I realized the entire right side of the bracelet was messed up and getting worse and worse with each row.

I had to pull out most of the bracelet and start again. This brings me back to Mistake 1. If I wasn’t using the designer label floss, I would’ve just started fresh. I literally cried.

Although the process was a rough first try, I am really happy with the final result.

I ended it with two braids that slip through the slipknot and tie in a bow.

The hand-dyed fabrics gave the final product a pretty interesting look. The green, for example became paler or deeper in different sections.

Although the inconsistent colors made the bracelet more interesting, the inconsistent knots are more YIKES than interesting.

In early December, Nova posted her pattern for Pillow Pockets.

The pattern was so incredibly cute, I just knew I wanted to make one for my niece, but I wasn’t sure I could pull it together in time for her birthday. I kept seeing the pattern pop up all over the internet and read about how fun and simple this pattern is to complete, so I thought I would give it a try.

After an evening pulling out all of my fabrics and choosing colors for the Dresden Plate, I spent some time trying out different backgrounds for the pillow. I really like the high contrast between the background fabric and the Dresden Plate in Nova’s samples.

I also liked the idea of something more harmonious.

In the end, I decided on the strawberries because pink is the girl’s favorite color and I’m not sure what other project lends itself so well to hot pink strawberries.

The Dresden plate was straightforward to piece together, but I had never made a pillowcase before, so I anticipated pulling out a lot of stitches stitches and trying to figure it all out. Indy settled in for a long evening, but the pattern was actually a snap.

I found every step of the way so rewarding. Each night I worked on this, I went to sleep pretty pleased. I have had a couple dud patterns recently, so I am grateful for the clear instructions I know I saved myself a lot of headache.

Finished with hours to spare before her party!

I kept the quilting super simple.

I used a complimentary stripe for the fabric in the back. I just added this to my stash after visiting (read: paying extremely high prices for little bits of gorgeous fabrics) Britex in San Francisco.

Okay, EXTREMELY simple quilting. Don’t mind the cat hair.

I received a stack of Robert Kaufman Poseidon solids for Christmas and the one I tried out as a background fabric ended up making a perfect for the binding.

I repeated the stripe inside the pocket.

I am really happy with the final product.

The birthday girl was pretty happy too!

I made a few mug rugs for my coworkers this year. I lost my camera for a couple days, so here are some blurry shots from my cell phone.

I bought the red mugs from Bed Bath & Beyond and found some glittery ribbon at a card store. I rolled up the “rug” and put it inside and wrote a card.

The dots were leftover from Bounce, and the smaller prints were from my Trip Around the World quilt. I bought the square floral piece from a quilt show in Somers. I’m really pleased how smaller print fabrics compliment it!

I didn’t use a pattern, but it is similar to my last mug rug. This one came out a little smaller, which I think is how they are “supposed to be.” (Unlike the corners of this project, which are not at all how they are “supposed to be.”)

I quilted it with my walking foot on my machine. This seems like the kind of project that should zip up in no time, but I made six of them and ran into a bunch of small issues so the project took a couple weeks of evenings. In the end, I’m happy with how they came out and I think my coworkers will really enjoy them!

I bought this pattern at Keepsake Quilting over the summer, and despite the delay in posting the results, I did actually have this finished three weeks before Halloween!

My rug is such a heinous back-drop. Sorry about that. This should be the kind of project that zips up in a night or two, but I broke down while working on this multiple times.

Do you see this shape? I somehow imagined sewing this to fusible web (a light material that has glue on one side), then turning it inside out and gluing it down. Turning it inside out didn’t work out at all. Turns out I needed a different gluey material. I needed to cut everything out all over again. Then, I completely destroyed my iron with glue. The pattern also didn’t include enough fabric for a backing or a binding. Thanks, guys! That wasn’t a pain at all!

The good news is I am starting to get the hang of quilting on my machine for these small projects.

This summer was packed with local trips to really cool little places. I made it to Mystic, CT; Bar Harbor, ME; Lake George, NY; Poquott, NY; New Paltz, NY; Boston, MA; Manchester, NH; Portsmouth, NH; and to a wedding in a cutesy little town on the Hudson River.

But for quilting, New Hampshire was the place to be. I went to a great little quilt shop in Portsmouth and bought a slew of over-priced fat quarters. They were beautiful, but I paid!

I really love them and I knew I’d need a bunch more fabrics to make a full quilt, but I didn’t want it to be super matchy and use fabrics all by the same designer, so I picked up a bunch more fabrics at the Pennsylvania Quilt Extravaganza. They match beautifully, but not so much that it will look like a Pottery Barn Quilt.

Then I decided to run a little test that Kaffe Fassett talked about in the workshop I went to. His philosophy is that the most interesting quilts should be a mixture of light and dark fabrics and contrasts that excite the eye. It is actually really hard to tell if a fabric is “light” or “dark” based on color alone, and Kaffe carries around a red magnifying glass that helps him see the tones. He said another way to see the tones is to take a black and white shot of the fabrics:

Uh oh. These fabrics are all different colors and prints, but in the harsh black and white photo, they are so, so blah. I think it’s going to take a lot more contrasting fabrics to make this into a beautiful quilt.

I also made it to Keepsake Quilting!! The mecca!

I didn’t realize we were so close to this shop, but there was a sign in the road that said Keepsake was coming up on the right and I opened the door in mid-traffic and ducked and rolled out of the car. The people were so friendly and helpful and the selection was mind blowing.

I had no idea where to begin, but I had been eyeing this kit in their catalog for a few months. The color in this photo is terrible, but I bought the pattern on the left and all the colors so I am ready to go. It is probably too ambitious for this halloween, but maybe!

I bought a few things at the Quilt Show.

At Somers, I got this animal print that I ‘d like to make something for my niece with. She has a play kitchen so I’ve been thinking about an apron or some hot mitts, but I’m not sure how much use she’d get out of that. I think she’d love a bag, but the print is pretty large and I’d like to use all of the animals. I’m just not sure what to do.

I also purchased these prints at the quilt show for myself:

These actually go well with what I have leftover from my Mug Rug project. I just wish I knew how to make clothes.

I like the bold colors in this print. I think it would make beautiful kitchen curtains.

In the last stretch of cold weather when most people were dying for a warm sunny day, I, for the first time, started feeling anxious about summer. Summer is by far my favorite season, but it kind of means hanging up the quilts and spending time outside. So I had been looking for a more portable project to keep my hands busy.

Crewel is the same thing as embroidery, but the thread is two strands of wool wrapped around each other rather than one.

I didn’t realize this when I bought it, but each window and roof uses a different stitch. The instructions are exceptionally clear and I’m learning so much.

And also able to enjoy the parks.

I’ve been jonesing to try a smaller project step away from Bounce and when I was invited to a bridal shower, I had the perfect reason to put away the quilt and try making something different. I was thinking of making coasters or oven mitts, but then I remembered seeing Nova post about a whole new category of household things: mug rugs.

Seriously, click that link and look at those photos. Mug rugs are bigger than coasters, but smaller than placemats. They are supposed to be sized for a mug and a snack.

I started at the fabric store.

Then I pulled out my personal stash.

After clicking through tons of examples of mug rugs, I started putting together my design.

I spent a day psyched about how quickly I finished the top.

I have very little experience machine quilting, so even though it was straightforward, it took me some time to get comfortable.

And of course the thin, blue binding wasn’t finished until I was on the train headed to the party, which made getting shots of the finished product difficult.

My sister made this for Anthony for his birthday.

In January I took a class at City Quilter on machine quilting. I machine quilted Gwendo’s quilt prior to the class, but I used a walking foot to create a meandering line, which I now know was definitely the hard way. The introduction to machine quilting workshop gave me a lot of practice using the walking foot for STRAIGHT lines.

She also showed us how to make a quilt sandwich using two pieces of muslin and batting and then how to baste the sandwich using safety pins. I am really interested in machine quilting some of my lap-sized quilts, but I wanted to test the waters with a smaller project.

I began by taping the back of my quilt (right side down) to a large, hard surface. The instructor suggested using tables pushed together at a local school or community space because the floor is bad for your back. I prefer the comfort of home and am lucky enough to have just enough square footage of hardwood to do this project.

The bottom layer should be pulled taught. The second layer is the batting.

This is the cottony layer that makes the quilt warm and fluffy. This layer doesn’t need to be tight, just smooth.

I use Quilters Dream, which is a really soft all-cotton batting that is easy to sew through. I could also get away with quilting my lines far apart using this high-quality batting. I probably could’ve gone with a more budget brand since this quilt which will most likely be hung up or tossed around and not used for warmth.

Finally I laid the quilt top on the sandwich and smoothed it out flat. Here’s where my mistakes started!

I’m using an orange thread that will show up brightly on the back and front so I didn’t want to just stitch in the ditch. I planned to quilt a quarter inch in from the seam so the quilt would have a lot of little boxes within boxes. That is why I placed all the pins in the center of the squares.

When pinning the quilt, you are supposed to start in the center and move outwards.

I used curled safety pins to pin the quilt. These work well because as soon as you pop them in, they are curved up to pop back out. The label also promises they are “quilt safe.”

However, when I took them out:

Also, after I put them in, I realized the patchwork of the quilt seemed kind of web-like, and I decided to go with that theme and quilt a bunch of diagonal lines to make the orange thread look like a spider web across the whole quilt.

I wasn’t brave enough to wing it, so I had to draw guide lines AFTER I pinned it.

With the lines in place, quilting it actually happened pretty quickly.

Again, I started in the center and moved outwards.

I was able to finish the top in one rainy afternoon. The results look good from a distance, which is usually my goal.

Up close, I was unhappy with how the knots looked where the sewing started and stopped. The workshop leader said we could just shorten our stitch length as we got to the end, but I think even stitching is important throughout the quilt. I ended up just setting my stitch length to zero at the end and getting these balled up knots. I am not sure what the proper way to start and end a machine quilted stitch, but it’s something I definitely have to figure out before I put some of my more complex quilts under the needle.

Overall, I’m very happy with this little buddy. I got the goblin wizard panels and coordinating fabrics from a Quilt Show on Long Island this summer. I got the solids from The Cambridge Quilt Shop and the people helping me there were awesome. I went there with no real pattern in mind, but they were able to give me the right amount of fabric to make this all work.

I am tucking this away until it is closer to Halloween when I will curse having to work on the binding to finish it off.