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!  :-)

Orange Bunny

My latest project - I wanted to make a soft toy for looking at rather than playing.  So I looked through this great book...

... and chose this bunny pattern...

This is the finished bunny...

...with embroidered face in contrasting orange...

...and a daring orange dress hiding an orange pom-pom tail (made from wool leftover from this project).

I made the bunny using a cotton/linen blend which I interfaced to give it more stability.  This wasn't suggested in the book - in fact their bunny was in felt - but the linen makes it look really nice.  She's a solid bunny and although I'm very impressed with the pattern, I have a few changes I'd make next time.  She needs smaller ears, the head gusset needed to be longer and I still need to change the limbs some more.

'Stuffed Animals' is a great book because it really gets into the details of stuffed toy making (it is my only book on the topic though) and has heaps of hints for building your skills.  I'm a bit disillusioned with many craft books at present because the patterns and ideas are very simple and dare I say it - you don't really need the book to make it!

On a different note we have our local Agricultural and Pastoral (A&P) Show coming up next weekend and I've been tidying up a few projects to enter in the needlework section.  We've also been trying to train Patty the lamb to walk with Miss K.  It's going ok but the two of them haven't quite worked out who should be boss yet!

I'm looking forward to seeing the poultry on display at the Show as we are hoping for new developments in our own chook collection.  One of our New Hampshire Reds is sitting on fertile Black Orpington eggs that we got from a breeder - she's barely moved.  Fingers crossed!  We are also waiting for the chance to get a (much) larger hen-house from the same retiring breeder.  This hen was the first of ours to start laying so we may have another broody from the others this season.  Nothing happens in a rush with these girls - and so many things can go wrong - but it is fascinating.