Christmas gift exchange

I belong to Sew Sisters, a weekly stitching group. Although, I am unable to attend a lot of the meetings, I always enjoy the creative input and lively conversations when my schedule allows me to attend. This year, I decided to participate in the holiday gift exchange. I made a wool appliqué pin cushion which is about 4 1/2" square and filled with crush walnut shells.


I am on a Bernina Yahoo group and a few months ago, the leader of the group posted information about a machine embroidery web site called Urban Threads. Urban Threads had some very unique and modern machine embroidery designs and I purchase 2 of their designs. One of the designs I purchased was Have a Holly Jolly Christmas which I used to make a gift bag for the cactus pincushion. The bag is 7 1/2" by 10".


I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season and a happy, healthy and prosperous new year.

Christmas stockings

I needed to make a few new stockings this year and all the Christmas stocking are now hanging. I actually finished the stocking over a week ago, but life got a bit hectic and I was unable to do a blog post. I made a set of stockings for my daughter's new condo plus I also needed to make a new stocking for Emmie, my daughter's new miniature poodle for my house.

My stocking are made using Vogue pattern 1312 which came out in the early 1970's. In 2010, I used a Bernina 180 to embroidery the names on the stocking cuffs using a font installed on the machine. Luckily, Bernina kept the same font on my current machine, a Bernina 790. It is always a challenge to make sure the once the cuff in sewed on and turned down that the name is in the correct position and I must admit that I did sew one of the cuffs on incorrectly. Well that is why they make seam rippers.

I made the stocking for Marcie with Hoffman Christmas batiks which were retired in 2009 but I was able to find the batiks at my favorite on-line batik source, Batiks Plus.

Peanuts Christmas Quilt

Charles Schultz's Peanuts characters, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucie and Marcie, have always been a favorite of mine. I have a lot of Peanut character Christmas ornaments which always bring a smile to my face. When I saw the Peanuts Christmas fabrics in 2012, I just had to buy enough fabric to make a quilt. It took me a few years to decide on a quilt pattern. My ideas always were rather complex and so I kept putting off making the quilt. This year, I decided to just keep it simple and decided to just make shadow box frames for each block. Jessica Jones Gamez did the machine quilting, she chose a perfect overall christmas light pattern. The quilt is about 47' by 47".