Quilting

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Since I'm without my own laptop, my posts will be pretty brief. (But oh how nice it is to be type on a machine with a working space bar!)

My One Monthly Goal for December is to finish my son's bed quilt. It is a twin-sized quilt and had been basted for quite some time. I had thread and a quilting motif picked out. This week I finally got it under the needle and got started. After the first spiral I calculated that I needed to make about 179 more to finish the quilt. Eek! I made some of the spirals a little larger to help cut down the total number needed, but this is still going to be slow going. And I'm going to try to resist calculating how many more spirals I have left. It's still a lot.

I love the texture created by this motif that I also used on this smaller Very Hungry Caterpillar quilt. I'm working in small chunks of time on this large project. It may not get done this month, but I'm happy to be making progress.

Thanks for visiting!

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Tonight is the first night of Hanukkah. Chag sameach! We give gifts to our kids each night. I have paper gift bags that I reuse each year, but I've been wanting to make reusable fabric gift bags that would last even longer. I was planning to make Jeni Baker's Lined Drawstring Bags that I mentioned in my gift ideas post. I've made them many times and they are fabulous! But after making the pillowcase using the magical burrito method last week, I decided it would be faster and easier to make pillowcase-style gift bags. The gifts I have for the kids are mostly small, so I opted for a miniature-size pillowcase. I used a fat quarter of the main fabric and a 22" x 8" strip for the cuff. This ended up making long skinny bags, but they will work. I worried that a narrower piece of fabric for the cuff would have made it challenging to make the burrito. You can see in my first couple pictures that the burritos are pretty full.

Here's a peek of the inside where you can see the purple fabric folded up in the orange burrito. To see the full magic of the process, be sure to watch Crafty Gemini's video tutorial.

And here are my finished pillowcase-style gift bags. They aren't identical in size, but they are each about 9 1/2" x 20". I think I will make fabric ties to tack onto the bags so they can easily be tied closed (and we won't lose the ties).

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