Design Wall Monday 9-17-12

Today my son turns 21. My goodness ... where has the time gone? I'm very proud of the man he's become.

Okay - on to sewing. I'm continuing to work on the Christmas wall hanging that I posted about last week. My progress this week has been to finish the bead-loom woven central focal piece - well, I say "finished" but I still have 80 ... count 'em 80 ... thread ends to weave in - then it will be finished. I have the quilt sandwich made and will quilt it and bind it this week. This pattern is actually a cross stitch pattern from Mill Hill Designs that converted quite nicely to a bead loom chart.

The very last step will be to applique the cross-stitched and bead woven "decorations" onto the wall hanging. Thank you to my sister for naming this piece for me ... Deck The Halls.

Thursday night Ruth and Lori came over to my burrow for Needle Nite. We had a blast playing with polymer clay and making buttons. I think it was Lori who casually tossed out the idea of swapping some Christmas fabrics between the 3 of us for a table topper called Crooked On Purpose. Then Saturday we had an impromptu Needle Nite and agreed to move forward with the Crooked On Purpose plan so everyone brought 3 rectangles of 5 different Christmas fabrics. I finished my table topper top tonight! Love it! This week I'll quilt and bind it.

Am continuing to work on the Craftsy.com blocks of the month. 18 are finished so far for January through September. October will be paper piecing then we'll have a 20 block quilt to assemble.

Next I'm hoping to begin working on sweatshirts converted to jackets. These seem to be good candidates for the handmade polymer clay buttons.

Visit Design Wall Monday to check out what everyone else is working on.

Design Wall Monday 9-10-12

Christmas!  This project actually started out innocently enough. I bought a few cross-stitch/bead ornaments kits by Mill Hill Designs from Weaver's Web yarn shop in New Bern. They were fun to do. So then I decided it would be a good idea to think of a way to display them together since individually they might get "lost" on the tree, and considering how much time goes in to stitching and beading each one, I want them to be noticeable.

Then I saw this lovely tone-on-tone Christmas fabric at Cotton Fields Quilt Shop .... well, one thing led to another ... and I decided to make a small Christmas wall hanging onto which these ornaments will be appliqued.

The center ornament, though, is not finished because rather than cross-stitching it, I'm going to use the pattern as a bead loom design (see photo of my new handy-dandy bead loom!) and it will be the focal point of this piece. I'm not married to this exact placement of the ornaments ... still mulling it over but so far I'm okay with it. A lot of time has gone in to this small wall hanging! And a lot of beads.

Other than assembling the September blocks for the Craftsy.com's block of the month club, I haven't done any other sewing.

For Needle Nite this week Ruth, Lori and I are going to venture into the world of polymer clay and try our hand at making some unique buttons. At the ArtRageous Quilters meeting last weekend one of the members brought for show-n-tell some buttons she had made from polymer clay and I fell in love with them! By the way, our meeting was so interesting and inspiring. Christine Zoeller, a professor of textile art at East Carolina University, demonstrated to us some techniques for working with tulle, silk organza, and other transparents fabrics. Fascinating!

Patchwork Times is hosting Design Wall Monday today. Check it out!