Sewing It Up!

In the past three months, I have completed a few small projects that I am pretty happy with. I made a pair of pillows for my sister for Christmas, and then I liked them so much that I had to replicate them for myself. I made 14inch ones for me; the ones I made for her were 18inches, and they were huge. Both sets of pillows are in a log cabin pattern, complete with the red middle that I understand is the tradition for the log cabin look. For this second pair, I used "invisible zippers," which, until I get better, I need to avoid. They are a pain to work with.



I have some friends whom I have sewn with pretty regularly for the last 6 months. I don't know what I would do without these ladies (for a number of reasons, but I will stick to the topic at hand -- sewing). They are not all that more advanced than I am, so we fumble through projects and when we put our minds together, we get turn out some fantastic things. Here is a bag PMB made yesterday. She then gifted it to me. How sweet is that?!

And EH made this really cute pencil case. Earlier in the year, she made a really cool dress with the brown fabric pictured here. She definitely struggled with the directions for the pattern of the dress. Actually, in true sewing circle spirit, we all struggled with it. What is it about patterns? It was like a foreign language. We have thought about taking a class on patterns to teach us the secrets.





I worked on what I thought was going to be a change purse, but ended up larger than expected. I am thinking that I will put a CD in it and give to my friend KJH for her birthday. My lesson of the day was buttons. It was the first time that I sewed a not-just-for-practice button on. I made a few mistakes: 1) I don't know how/when to use the guard on the feet. My directions book said I would need it, but then when I used it, my thread got that bunched up beard thing on the bottom. 2) I made the hole too small. I thought that I had measured the button correctly, but alas! Luckily, I also screwed up one of the ends of the hole, so I was able to just extend the slit slightly. As you can sort of see, none of this tearing is too visible: