Christmas 2014 Gift Bags

Long-time readers of this blog may be weary of seeing fabric gift bags, but I’m not tired of making them! This December, I was a bag making machine, and churned out seventeen gift bags. The first five were simplified versions of the Lined Drawstring Bag from In Color Order, but I decided that it wasn’t going to work for the large amount of bags I needed. For the twelve bags that I whipped up in an assembly line fashion, I used the Reversible Patchwork Bag tutorial from Pink Penguin. My favorite bag is the jumbo one I made out of a charm pack of Kate Spain’s Solstice line. Often I buy a charm pack of a line so I can see the fabrics in person before deciding if I want to buy any yardage, so I have quite a few floating around without a planned purpose. Speaking of yardage, I think I only used only one new fabric in these bags – the rest was stash!

I’ve been making fabric gift bags for Christmas since 2010. My mom makes them too, so we always have several moving back and forth between our houses. This year, between the extras I made, and the ones we received from my parents, I finally feel like I have a head start on next year’s Christmas gift bags. Here’s hoping I keep up the momentum and reduce the inevitable holiday stress by having my Christmas gift bags all finished earlier next year.

Christmas Cowls

I don’t know about you, but I live in scarves and cowls during the winter. As a last minute Christmas present, I decided to whip up a couple cowls for family members. I purchased the Scarves and Cowls pattern by Make It Perfect via Indie Sew and set to work.

For the first cowl, I used flannel Sketch fabric from Timeless Treasures, purchased specifically for this project. Everything was going smoothly until it came time to join the ends together and turn it right side out. At that point, my cowl turned into a tube. I read and reread the directions. For the life of me, I could not figure out what I was doing wrong. I thought I was following the directions, but it was hard to tell, because there were no pictures whatsoever. Frustrated, I unpicked the last seam, turned it right side out, and then contorted it so that I could sew most of the seam by machine. Then I finished the seam by hand. As soon as I put it on, I loved it. So cozy! This one was really hard to give away. I’ll have to make myself a flannel cowl soon. 

Emboldened by the success of my first cowl, I dove into my stash and pulled out two long hoarded Kate Spain Cuzco prints for the second cowl. For this one, I cut 9” strips instead of 12” and I like how it turned out. It's like two cowls in one!

I will definitely make more cowls with these dimensions again, but I’ll continue to disregard the pattern instructions, since they don’t make sense to me. At the end of the day, what matters is the finished product, and I’m really pleased with these two cowls. I hope the recipients enjoy them.

Cotton + Steel Quilted Placemats

I didn’t make a lot of handmade gifts this holiday season, but what I did make, I really like. First up are my Cotton + Steel Quilted Placemats. I subscribe to the Pink Castle Fabrics Cotton + Steel Club, so each month, I receive a bundle of assorted Cotton + Steel fabric. Purl Bee’s Quilted Placemats were the perfect way to play with my new fabrics while simultaneously making a present. I used four different fat quarters for the front of the placemats. For the back, I used Dottie fabric for all of them, for consistency’s sake. Two of the backs are actually leftover fabric from my Bubblegum Glam Clam quilt. The bindings were all solids from my stash.

I really loved making these placemats. They were simple, fast and fun. It was a joy to quilt something small for a change. Even though I don’t usually do bias binding, the oval shape was so much fun to bind. No corners to miter! It was so satisfying to finish one of these in between my bigger projects. I definitely see more quilted placemats in my future.