Paper Pieced Tree Frog

I always find it a bit challenging to make a thing I'm not passionate about, I've learned to say no to making things for people when they ask (it tends to be a chore instead of a joy, and I have enough chores) but I do make gifts now and again that might not be exaclty to my tastes.

My boyfriend's mother is visiting later this month and I wanted to make her something... I don't know too much about her preferences, but I've been told she likes frogs.  I planned on going the ceramics route and throwing a bowl or mug, digging deep for my inner artist and sculpting a frog to it, but moving got in the way, so I defaulted back to sewing.

Craftsy has lots of affordable patterns, and then there are the free ones, which bring me so much joy!  I found a few paper pieced frog patterns online, but I couldn't really beat this one which is free and adorable.  The description mentions how the lady found the art in German, and deconstructed it into a pattern. It says intermediate difficulty, but I think if you have any experience with paper piecing you'd find it pretty doable.

I changed the size down to an 8" square, am adding a border, quilting it, and turning it into a box pouch.  I haven't done any free motion quilting or made any pouches for over a year so I'm sure I'll have some madcap adventures in seam ripping coming up!  I want to put googly eyes on it, but I'm not sure the recipient would find that as amusing as I would. :(

New York Beauty Pillow

I am not sure I'm getting any better at paper piecing, but I am getting more patient at unpicking tiny stitches!

Pretty sure I'd written about wanting to do some New York Beauty blocks from the QAL that Sara at Sew Sweetness did last year.

I was originally going to do four blocks for the front and four for the back but I decided to take the easy way out and ..not do that. A nice simple back was about all I was up for by the time I finished the front :|

I used blocks 0, 4, 8 & 6. There are tutorials with helpful hints, all of which I totally ignored.

I didn't expect to default to "the sun is yellow, the sky is blue" philosophy but it sure simplified fabric planning!  I wish I'd taken pictures before I made it into a pillow, it was much prettier flat.  Seems like I should've added a border around it so the blocks were fully visible.  If I'd paid better attention in the Flickr group I would've realized this would be a problem. 




I stuffed this instead of using a pillow form, and handstitched the opening closed.  One thing I DO need to do is figure out how to sew pillows closed so that it doesn't crimp oddly.

Apparently out of the many many ways to do it, I chose an option that wasn't any of them.  I'll be be resewing the closure when I have a bit of time because it doesn't look nearly as lovely as it should.





The back well...an appliqued sun and free motion quilted clouds.  Not too much to say about it *cough* I took the lazy way out, as an excuse to practice my fmq.

I'm glad I tried my hand at these blocks, they didn't scare me too much, and it was relatively easy to match the seams up (aka I didn't screw anything up too much)

Now that I've had a few more minutes to think about it I've realized a better option is to just  un-pillow this and turn it into a mini quilt for the bedroom. I have a lot more wall space available than pillow space after all...

sensed photo op, butted in.

Paper Pieced Insulated Trivet & Visit to Urban Craft Uprising

Well that's a mouthful!

Star cut out from an 8" circle of cardstock

I'm doing a bit more paper piecing here and there I love that you can make anything you can dream of, but I cant draw so drawing pictures then deconstructing them isn't a walk in the park and I have to keep it simple.  Luckily there's wiser people out there than me for when I want to upgrade to complicated projects! Until then I'll just cut things out of cardstock with trial and error ;)

I used La Dee Da Floradots in Saffron from Free Spirit Fabrics for the star.  My plan was to have a well graduated circle of light to dark blue around it, but I didn't stop to make sure I had that before cutting things out (I do NOT do so well with the planning stages of fabric choice...) so it got a bit wonky and I didn't really get a good mix between small and large prints either, but I'm still happy with how it turned out.  Art gallery's Pure Elements in empire yellow made a good match for the binding,  which was sewn on with pearl cotton thread.

Since I figured I may as well make this Christmassy I used one holiday tree fabric on the front, and for the back one of the Christmas fabrics my mother in law gifted me.  It's sandwiched as following:
Backing fabric
Layer of cotton batting
Layer of insulated batting
Paper pieced star
I'm impressed with how well the insulated batting works, and a yard of it is taking me a long way, I've made two potholders, 4 trivets, and still have enough for a couple more things.

Urban Craft Uprising December 2012

I made it to Seattle's Urban Craft Uprising for the first time last weekend with my sister.  It was a great show, but I was a little dissapointed that while there were vendors of all sorts, there weren't that many people selling handmade goods of the crafty variety.  Jewelry, art, food products, ceramics, carnivorous terrariums, amazing clothing, but the only handmade vendor that didn't seem to be geared towards felty animal crafts was geared towards baby stuff.  I think i was hoping to get a lot of inspiration at the show, but mostly I just emptied my wallet!

I came away with $40 in salt :| $12 boxes of macaroons (that got crushed in my purse :( ), a bit of art including some fun from LaRu and some stocking stuffers for my husband.  Now that everybody can use their smart phones to take debit cards, the world has become a much more dangerous place for my budget!

Color Wheel Paper Piecing

I made this color wheel several months ago, but as I didn't starch the devil out of it before I removed the paper, it didn't stay perfectly round so it had been sitting on my design wall just staring at me.

After getting to work on my paper piecing Star Blossom project from the Handstitched class Rachel from Stitched in Color put on earlier this year, I figured I should suck it up and figure out how to deal with it since I had to stretch the star blossom onto canvas anyway, and had bought canvases for both projects.

I Managed to get it mostly round on the inside & outside.  I pinned it to an 18" square piece of Kona (in Bone).  My q-snap frame wasn't holding it stretched evenly (fabric was too thin so wasn't being gripped firmly on all 4 sides), so there was a bit of distortion when I sewed it on.  I used DMC pearl cotton in size 8 to stitch it on.  Now that I think about it further, putting batting scraps for thickness where the fabric is held onto the frame to give it thickness would've probably fixed that problem.


 I used a teeny bit of 505 spray basting between the fabric and the canvas to secure it in place while I stretched and tacked it onto a 12" square frame.  It was actually pretty easy to do that, and I'm glad I got down to business!

For the color wheel itself, I just traced a dinner plate, then traced a bowl inside of it off center inside that circle and divided it (mostly) evenly into 12 sections.  Had a bit of trouble choosing something for the green-blue fabric, as I didn't really have any and couldn't find a good one while browsing either.  I'm finding improve paper piecing rather fun, so I've already cut out a star pattern to work with next.