Christmas Ornaments (One of Probably Many)

I've been sewing some Christmas ornaments recently which were a lot of fun to make.  Isn't this small Christmas tree cute!?!  It's only about 4 1/2 inches tall.

These are from a company called Lumenaris, made in America, which is always good.  I found the kit in my local quilt store, The Loft.

It was great, because the little box included absolutely everything I needed to complete the three ornaments.  The pre-cut pieces of felt--all of them, the trees, the stars, the circle ornaments, and the pre-cut batting for filling.  Also included were the necessary embroidery floss and even a needle.  The only thing I needed to add was a thread snips.  And the thread snips, by the way, even fit into the small box!

Abstract Buttons

In a previous post I wrote about a class taught at our guild by Rosalie Dace.  I had started work on a three-piece quilt based loosely on a painting by Wassily Kandinsky.  This is how my pieces looked when finished.  They were three different widths, between about 10.5" and 14" wide.  They were all about 32 inches long.

I worked deep purple curved strips into the black background.  Then I attached the various circles onto the background.  I used quite a few decorative stitches for this.  I free-motion quilted loose, intertwined circles onto the fabric circles.

More crazy circle quilting!

I quilted a few wavy lines up and down the quilts.  Then I wanted to add some more interest, so I did some long hand quilting stitches in wavy lines up and down the pieces.

This is the "rogue" block with the square pieces instead of round!

And again, the finished product.  I learned a better technique for adding a faced binding than I had used before.  I'd never sought out a way to do this, and just added two facing strips on each side, sewed them down, then added two facing strips on the top and bottom.  But this method is much better.  It gives a mitered corner finish on the backside.  You can find the tutorial on the Occasional Piece blog.  Elizabeth, the writer of this blog, is a talented quilter and a really good blogger, too. 

I entered Abstract Buttons in Art in the Redwoods, an annual art show at Gualala Arts Center in Gualala, California.  I won the "Red Dot Award," which means I had a red dot on the entry ticket, indicating someone bought my quilt!  So that was very rewarding.