Christmas makings

Now that Christmas is over and the gifts have been given I can share some of the hand made gifts I gave this year.

For my son and daughter in law I wanted to make a tree ornament that said something special about 2008. So what better than to remember the campaign and election of Barak Obama? I snagged a photo of the Obama symbol from the campaign web site and proceeded to copy the shape for a round ornament. It was fun to do and turned out pretty nice. Andrew and Sarah really enjoyed receiving it and agreed that it will be a good remembrance of 2008.

For my each of my two sons I wanted to make a boxy shaped bag with a zipper. I followed the tutorial here, well I tried to anyway. The first time I got the width and length of the body transposed and ended up with a rectangle instead of a box.
It was amazing to me that I got almost all the way done before I realized that this object was not short and wide but long and narrow. Oh well. Andrew liked it and does feel he has a use for it. It actually is a good size for tools.











For my musician son I wanted to make a boxy bag that would hold CD's. This time I carefully thought out what the dimensions needed to be and actually measured a CD case. (how clever) I used a piece of fabric that Nathan had given me quite awhile ago, something that spoke to him while visiting JoAnn's with a girlfriend. I did not get a sewing room photo, so here you can see Nathan with it on our sunny Christmas afternoon.












Last but not least, the big ta da. I decided about 2 weeks before Christmas to make a quilt for Andrew and Sarah. My husband is making them a very nice blanket chest/coffee table and it occurred to me that a lap size quilt for the inside would be very useful. I selected a pattern with very large pieces and enlarged the lap size so that it is basically almost twin size. I went with a black and white colorway so that it will not show the dog hair of their black dog too badly. Needless to say I did not finish this before Christmas. It is pieced and pinned together, and that's how it was wrapped and given to them. They really liked it, here they are holding it up for a work in process photo. Since I knew they would not be going home with the quilt, I did whip up a set of 6 cloth coasters out of the black and white fabrics. No photo of those, sorry.









One more item to share. While Andrew and Sarah were visiting Sarah mentioned that she wanted to make a dog bed for their dog out of an old egg shell mattress pad, folded to a 36 x 46ish size. So, we went to Joann and found a really nice piece of purplish fur on sale. Sarah also wanted to line the bed with mylar insulated batting so that it would feel nice and warm to the dog. Sarah and I worked on this yesterday. We had to add a strip of black duck so that the piece was wide enough, since the edge of the fur had a very loosely woven selvedge. Here you can see Sirius quite contented with the results.