Parent's gifts

What do you get for the parents who have everything when Mother's Day and Father's Day rolls around?  I answered that question with some homemade gifts this year.

For Dad,  I made a reversible chef's apron.  I picked two fabrics that I knew he would like.  The first was this food printed fabric with all the Italian ingredients he loves:

And for the reverse side, I chose a fabric with newspapers printed on it, because Dad reads the daily news from cover to cover every day.

I didn't remember to take a photo of the finished product, but here is a photo of one I made for him in the past and I used the same pattern:

For Mother's Day, I made my mom a case for her sunglasses.  She has a pair of those nifty wrap around sunglasses like these, that you wear over your ordinary glasses:

The glasses are too big to fit into a standard eyeglass case, and the drawstring bag that came with them offered little protection and had no personality.

I chose a multi striped fabric in her favorite peach/coral colors and quilted it with a few straight lines.

Then I added a casing to the top for the drawstring, and cut out some squares so I could box the corners:

Added a few beads just for fun:

And now Mom has a upgraded, stylish case for her sunglasses:

As crafters, we are so lucky to have the ability to make items with our own hands for the people we love.

Ice Cream Social

When I last updated with my progress on my Quilt Guild's mystery quilt,  I had parts and pieces that looked like this:

With each month's instructions, we added a new strip or corner to the blocks, and by the end of 7 months, we had 24 blocks that looked like this:

The final step of instructions  included at least 11 different setting options.  It was fun to play with them all see which one worked out best.  To begin, I just laid out the blocks in a straight set:

Nah, didn't like it.  So I rotated the blocks and got this:

Ahh, much better, but this small sample shows mostly the pink.  How about when there is more brown?

Okay, still liking it, but gotta try one more to play up the scrappy nature of my fabrics:

Pretty happy with this one, but there was one more I had to try.  This time I needed to include lots more blocks to get the whole picture, so I laid these out on my bed:

Umm...no.  Too much going on.  In the end, I went with Option #4, and my finished top looks like this:

At our final guild meeting of the year, we all brought in our tops to share.  Here is a sampling of some of them:

As you can see, there was lots of versatility with this one block.  For our quilt guild's annual show,  we display all the finished BOM quilts together which is so interesting to view.  I better get mine quilted so I can be a part of it.