Christmas thanks

I was once a teacher and understand all the hard work that goes in to caring for other people's children.  So K and I have a tradition of making small gifts for the teachers in her life.

We made twelve of these little houses for preschool teachers and some playcentre super-parents (the kind that love play and give up their time freely to get involved with our children).  We added tags and wrote our thank yous on those.

The pattern came from Kajsa Wikman's 'Scandinavian Stitches'.  I had used the same pattern two years ago to make similar gifts.

At K's Playcentre we have a fantastic supervisor who is not only an amazing teacher to the children but a font of knowledge for us as parents.  She goes way beyond what is expected of her and is adored by K.

We knew she has a thing for Christmas trees and is a bit of a crafty angel herself.  I had pinned this mini quilt from Pinterest and with K's help and an organised stash of green scraps we made this:

I used this an opportunity to practise my free motion quilting with a random doodle on the white part - I didn't even pre-mark it!  The tree was straight line quilted with a red and buttons were added as ornaments.  I also added my binding by machine sewing both sides. 

I used this book to help me with the binding...

'Quilting Modern' by Jacquie Gering and Katie Pederson is a fantastic resource for all sorts of modern quilting styles and it also has some of the best instructions I've seen on binding a quilt.  There is a technique in it that has made joining binding almost fool-proof, even without a fancy gizmo.

I've got a heap of Christmas projects to share and I'll be aiming to do so over the next few days - so beware - my catch up has started!  :-)