Liebster Blog

Cassie of Cassie's Crafties awarded me the Liebster Blog earlier this week!

The Liebster Award, liebster meaning favourite in German (I should know), apparently is an encouraging appreciative award for smaller blogs with 200 or less than 200 readers. Having blogged for less than two months with only three regular followers (thanks guys!) and just about settling into things, Cassie's passing along of the award came as a bit of a surprise. A pleasant one, of course. Thank you for thinking of me and I do enjoy reading your blog just as much! Especially as we share a love of Lotta Jansdotter's Echo fabric collection (then again, who doesn't?), her Kaleidoscope quilt in its various stages of production really drew my attention to her.

The Liebster Conventions say that :

1. Thank your award presenter on your blog and link back to him/her

    2. Copy and paste the award to your blog

    3. Present the Liebster Award to 5 blogs that you think deserve to be recognized

    4. Let them know by leaving a comment on their blog

    5. Have faith that your follower will spread the love, too !

Now onto the five blogs that I'd like to share and which, amongst many others which don't qualify for this award, I always look forward to reading:

Quilting in the Cold @Quilting in the Cold - I think she was the first or second to follow my blog, so she's very special to me, but it doesn't hurt that her small blog, the projects she shares, and eye for colour are lovely, too!

Jenelle @Echinops and Aster - Another blog that drew me close because of enticing fabric selections and colour combinations. Make sure to check out her latest project, an intensely adorable embroidered and quilted owl pillow.

perlendiva @Perlendiva - A friend blogs in German mostly, but I like her mix of sewing, crocheting, knitting, and jewellery making. Maybe she'll take up to posting bilingually more often soon?

GeekySweetheart @GeekySweetheart - A fantastically quirky and geeky blogger who doesn't post as regularly at the moment as she's had an adorable baby last year, but I'm hoping she'll get around to more projects and time to blog soon-ish.

Kerstika @Procraftination - A very young blog that has been put on hold due to exam stress and time constraints but will hopefully resume soon with more posts on pretty self-made dresses!

Winter Stitching

I'm linking up this post with Sarah's Winter Stitching Wrap Up at Fairy Face Designs.

So what did I make this winter? Not too much, I'm afraid. Certainly not a lot with good photographic evidence, or photographic evidence at all. Let's try to have a little round-up of mainly previously not-featured projects, nevertheless. It'll be more of an essay than a list, though, because I didn't have a list to start with. Thanks for letting me link up anyway, Sarah. Seeing what all the others have got going and being fond of lists, I'll be sure to join next time round.

First, there are seasonal pillow cases which I made for my future sister-in-law.  The first I decided to embellish with felt snowflakes and two more feature the oh so cute Michael Miller Reindeer fabric, the one where a red nosed Rudolph is standing between all the regular, brown nosed reindeer. I quilted these with a star shape but unfortunately I didn't take pictures of them back then. Personally, I love how batting and quilting gives pillow cases extra body because I tend to cuddle my pillows to death a lot so their insides end up worn out quickly, if you know what I'm rambling on about.

 

Happy pillows on a sofa, reindeer on the right. The patchworked one on the left is an older creation of mine.

These are pictures of my first baby quilt which I made as a Christmas present for a friend's baby boy. It's the one I sneaked in before finishing my very first quilt, the one I wrote about here and the one that is only partially a Winter stitching project as a lot of work took place over summer and only the quilting fell into December and binding was finished in January. Back to the baby quilt, the pictures aren't the best but will have to suffice with the quilt being in a different time zone and unavailable for a re-shoot now and I'm not going to post pictures of other people's kids on here.

 

Life forced me into a little (read: gross euphemism, it felt like ages) crafting hiatus for most of January and all of February, so I needed a real quick fix after it and whipped up two grocery shopping bags. The aqua/teal-ish one is pretty much a replica of one I gave away for Christmas. Presents actually involved a lot of projects which have gone unrecorded; five scarves, a knitted hat, an apron, oven mittens, and a hat for myself.

Next I experimented a little with stripes of dots. The result, a pillow with an envelope style back, was a little to unsettled for the fiancé so I decided to give it up to a more loving home and gave it away as a birthday present to a dear friend. I'm glad she loves it lots.

 

The biggest (and most unnerving) project of the season were my sister's curtains. You can read up on the not quite epic and possibly boring story here, here, and here. The posts include pictures of some knitting, too, but these are the pictures I could snap just the other day. Finally. Please excuse the terrible lighting and awkward angle. In the first picture you can see that there's a second curtain rod on the right side.

  

I also made a cute little frame purse.

Last weekend I whipped up five more pillow cases, for example this one.

With that, I'll return to my current big project, a set of matching baby and toddler quilts which call for quilting and binding. For better pictures of the tops (and a non-related, albeit clearly winter-stitched table runner), see this post.

Wow, that's a lot more than it felt like, even without the evidenceless projects! And, I've had so many non-clothes projects this past half year that I nearly forgot a pleated skirt that I made, complete with lining and hand sewn finishing touches like the blind stitched hem. I really should have ironed the skirt before taking the picture but sometimes I'm lazy. Sorry. As it looked even worse on the clothes hanger, I put it flat on the table. Again, sorry.

Because of the many layers of fabric of the folded hem, I machine stitched a line to 'secure' the layers before hand sewing the hem. The right side is really neat and the stitches are nearly invisible. The effort-success ratio of this actually served as the incentive to have a go at hand sewn binding.

Seeing how I nearly forgot about this skirt, I guess I need to put something wearable on my project list again. Luckily I got some gorgeous fabric and a pattern for my birthday not too long ago which are waiting for me with a 90 per cent chance of being turned into my hen do outfit. :)

Hope you're having a splendid week so far!