Sewing Felt Bird Christmas Ornaments

Please read through instructions before you start sewing!  Thank you!

You will receive a felt bird ornament kit, a needle and some pins.  Each kit should contain a bird front, a bird back, a button for an eye, and some embroidery floss.

Start sewing.  Center the eye in the head area - on the side of the bird with the wing.  Sew a few stitches in the button eye and then stitch around the wing.  

IMPORTANT: Sew one stitch at a time to get even stitches.  Each stitch should be about 1/8" long and about 1/8" from the edge of the wing.

Tie a knot and clip the thread.

 IMPORTANT: Make sure all knots are on the INSIDE of the bird.

Pin two sides of bird together making sure all edges line up as perfectly as possible.

Start stitching together the bird on the belly side of the bird.  Remember to hide all knots on the inside of the bird.

REMEMBER to sew ONE stitch at a time. Stitch all the way around the bird leaving about a 2-inch opening for stuffing.  Again, stitches should be about 1/8" long and 1/8" from edge of bird.

IMPORTANT:  If you make a stitch you don't like, take the needle off and then pull the thread back out to where you want to start over.  Re-thread the needle and try again!

Make sure to get a few stitches through the ribbon and through the beak.

Use a small amount of stuffing to give the bird a little bit of dimension - it takes very little stuffing.  Use your pinky or the end of a pen to get a little bit into the head.  Don't worry about stuffing the tail on the birds with skinny tails.

Stitch together the last bit.  Use a pin to hold it together if necessary.

Here's how to end the stitching and hide your "knot".  Stitch over your very first stitch.  Start to stitch the second stitch, but then turn your needle to the center of the bird and bring the needle out of the center of back of the bird.  

Snip off the thread.  Rub the nub of the thread and it will disappear into the bird.  

And "voila" - you have a felt bird Christmas ornament!

 

 

Black & White Quilts with Pops of Color

And poof!  I'm back on the blog after a two-year absence.  That's how I roll!  A friend wants to make a black and white quilt with her collection of black and white fabrics.  I started to compose a big long email to her with a bazillion links to click on.  Then I remembered a thing called pinterest, and then I remembered that I had a crafty blog!  Doh!  So, I decided it was time to resurrect the blog.  I searched for "black and white quilts with pops of color" because I thought a pop of color would jazz up a black and white quilt.  Here are some of my favorites, with and without pops of color.

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No pops of color on this one, but the white backgrounds make things pop!

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Quilty Love snuck in pops of color with the backing and the binding on this one.  Clever, right?!

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Here's a Kaufman fabric designed by Emmie K that might serve as great inspiration for a black and white wonder!  It looks like a bunch of half square triangles would do the trick!

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I am smitten with this mid-century design!

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Well, I could do this for hours, but I must stop and wash my hair.  Click here and here for a LOT more inspiration.  Toodles! 

Sheep and Wool and Stuff

In 1982 there were 22 sheep per person in New Zealand.  As of March 2016 the ratio went down to six sheep per person.  My brother-in-law, who lived in New Zealand for two years, brought me a couple of mondo skeins of baby weight grey wool yarn.  By the way, Danny is the best gift giver ever.  He knew I liked to knit and brought me yarn.  What a wonderful and thoughtful surprise!

Knowing that not-easy-to-care-for scratchy wool yarn would not be the best choice for a baby sweater, I made a baby sweater.  I guess I was ready to start a new project and the sample swatch I knit up with this yarn worked out perfectly for the bobbly sweater I had been wanting to make.  I love making bobbles and it's a good thing because there were plenty of them in the pattern.  At one point, I taught myself to knit backwards so that I wouldn't have to turn the knitting three times for each of the five thousand bobbles.  Anyway, here's the sweater.

I used a pattern from Classic Knits for Kids by Debbie Bliss.  At the time, she was my all-time favorite knit designer!  A picture of the sweater is on page 29 and the directions are on pages 65-67.

I saved the sweater forever and ever - for when Danny and his future wife would have a baby girl.  Danny eventually married and he and his wife had two boys, and it seemed that their family was complete.  Then, one day when their youngest was four or five, they surprised everyone by announcing they were having another baby - a girl this time.  I was excited to finally send the "yarn" back to Danny.  That was just a few years ago - probably at least 20 years after I had made the sweater.  Surprisingly, there were no moth holes in it.  Yeah, mission accomplished!

Remembering Bill

It's hard to believe that my stepdad passed away 13 years ago.  At the time, he and mom were living in San Diego and Howard and I were living in Needham, Massachusetts.  Bill stayed in a nursing home for nine months after having a debilitating stroke.  My mom had already retired and was able to be at his side constantly.  She would visit him twice a day for several hours to make sure that he was being taken care of properly.  I never saw him alive after his stroke because we lived so far away.

Bill always called me the human loom because I was always knitting something different every time he saw me.  In Needham, I continued to knit but also started to quilt.  After Bill passed away, I helped mom go through his clothes and discovered a bunch of blue flannel pajama bottoms and thought they would make a great quilt to remember him by.  He was obsessed with flying and airplanes so I backed the quilt with some airplane fabric that I found at the Franklin Mill Store in Franklin, Massachusetts.  I can't believe that I remember that! (Confession, I remembered the location of the shop, but had to look up its name.)

I created a plane template out of a manila folder and traced it with quilter's chalk in the non nine-patch squares.  I quilted each plane separately and back stitched the heck out of each starting and stopping point - hoping that it would hold through multiple washings.  Time will tell.

Here's the plane fabric that I used for the backing.  Also, I used my favorite technique of pieced binding.  I love the "scrappiness" of it.

PS  The interface on blogger has not changed one bit in my three-year absence, which is both a blessing and very disappointing.

Wisconsin Quilt

We lived in La Crosse, Wisconsin, for one year and we wish it could've been longer.  We loved everything about it, except for the winter that lasted for 6 months and the bazillions of mosquitoes that descended upon us during the muggy summers.

I started quilting in La Crosse and tried my first paper piecing project with this candy box heart pattern.

Don't you just love quilts with legs?!  Anyway, I usually avoid anything with hearts, but this was a special group project.  We wanted the young women at church to have an ongoing service experience.  Somehow we found out that the Renal Dialysis Unit at Gundersen Lutheran Hospital was drab and needed some holiday decor to cheer up patients who spent many hours at a time there.

We kicked off this partnership by taking a tour of the unit and learning about dialysis.  Then, after that, each month we would devote one of our weekly meetings to making decorations and one of them to decorating the unit.

We worked on the quilt together during a few of our weekly meetings.  I know we taught the girls how to applique and they made most of the star blocks.  I think some of them also helped sew the 4-patch blocks.  I can't remember if I made all the hearts or if we taught some of them to do that too. 

We gave this quilt to the unit to hang on the wall permanently.  I wonder if it's still there?  I hope the girls and other leaders cherish this experience as I much as I do.