Finishing up with February

It's time to tally up my progress in February's "Drop and Give Me Twenty" challenge, but before I do, here is one last project I finished this month:

Even though the Christmas season is long past, I have continued to use the mug rug that I made with Christmas fabrics so it was time to create something new.  I looked around my sewing room and found this little 5 inch square of sashiko quilting:

I created this little sample at a quilt guild meeting last fall when we had a speaker who taught us all about sashiko, and we all got a kit to try it out.  By the end of the meeting I had this little flower done.  I thought it would make a great little mug rug with a little quilting and binding.

I layered it with thin batting and a piece of blue and white fabric, then outline quilted around the flower shape:

Then I trimmed away just the batting:

Next I trimmed the backing fabric to an even one inch all around, and used the iron to press a half inch fold:

I turned the folded backing up onto the front of the mug rug and sewed along the edge:

When I reached the corners, I first folded in the corners at a 45 degree angle:

When the last side was folded and sewn, I had a new little mug rug!

The best part was when I took it to the kitchen and realized that my mugs were a perfect match!

It was a  complete coincidence that I have navy and white mugs with little 5 pointed flowers on them!

Being the last day of February, it is time to look back and the month and see how I did in the "Drop and Give Me Twenty" challenge.  My goal was to sew at least 20 minutes every day in February.  I started off great and logged in well over the 20 minutes a day for the first half of the month, but then I got side-lined with a miserable cold that turned into bronchitis so I did little to no sewing during the last part of the month and turned to knitting instead.

On the plus side, 20 minutes a day for 28 days is equal to 9 hours and 20 minutes, which I most definitely achieved this month, but only because I was an overachiever at the beginning.  Also on the plus side, I reached my original commitment goal which was to start and complete the first 5 steps of my guild's Mystery BOM and I made that happen.

In addition, this month I also:

•  resurrected a project from 2009  and re-purposed it into a Quilt for Kids donation, and a table runner
• dug out a miniature cheater quilt  and got it quilted and bound
• turned an orphan sashiko sample into a mug rug.
• finished knitting a prayer shawl, and almost finished crocheting a second one.

What I didn't get to do was spend one of the weeks in February practicing/playing with Free Motion Quilting.  I just didn't feel healthy enough to immerse myself in that.

It has been great fun to visit the Facebook page for the "Drop and Give Me 20" challenge and to be inspired by all the progress being made by the other 50-plus participants.  Overall, I'm going to call it a success.
Thank you, Beth Helfter for being our hostess/cheerleader.  I look forward to next year.

Tea With Friends

At our annual quilt guild Christmas party, my friend Rosemary gave me a cute quilt kit for "Tea Leaf Ornaments"

The finished ornaments, as pictured on the pattern, reminded me of Cathedral Windows, although I have no idea if they are similarly constructed.  Anyway, it was a new-to-me technique, so I decided to have a little fun and give it a try.

You start by folding the red and green squares on the diagonal,  with wrong sides together:

Next, you place a pair of the folded squares on top of a plain square,

and sew baste the triangles to keep them attached:

Then you use the squares as you would use any other fabric squares and make pinwheel blocks:

When you open out the folded edges,  it reveals the plain fabric underneath:

Then came the tricky part.  You need to sew the folded edges down so they will stay open.  I tried pinning first:

I could see there was trouble ahead, trying to maneuver around those pinheads.  Then I remembered that I had a fabric glue stick:

Surprisingly, it worked like a charm, and held the folded edges nicely while I sewed them down.  In retrospect, I should have used invisible thread for that part of the sewing, but I didn't have any on hand and I wanted to keep going.

The pattern was for making tree ornaments, but I decided I wanted a mug rug instead.  By adding a couple of fourpatch units, I would end up with a nice size.

A little light quilting, and then all it needed was a binding.  While I was in the mood to try new things, I decided to try a technique I had read about where the backing gets folded around to the front to make the binding.  It starts out looking like this:

and ends up looking like this:

That particular binding technique is probably better suited to a larger project, but in a pinch, it was fine.  All that was left to do was make up a nice cup of tea and enjoy my new mug rug!

The tea I chose was also a gift from the party.  My friend Linda gave me a tin of Downton Abbey English Rose tea.  The rasberries in the tea give it a lovely red color, just right for the season.

Speaking of seasons, season 5 of Downton Abbey is just around the corner.  Looks like I'm prepared, how about you?