Christmas crafting - revealed!

With Penelope being born so soon after Christmas, it got kind of hectic meeting up with friends and family to exchange presents.  Actually, I have yet to exchange secret santa presents with a group of friends from my modern quilting guild - so I do have one handmade present that I still have to keep under wraps.

I kept it pretty simple regarding the amount of gift sewing I took on this year.  Just a few simple projects for those closest to me.

In addition to the nesting pouches I've previously posted about, I've been working on the following....



My sister does a lot of traveling, so I made her a zippered dopp kit for her toiletries, using this tutorial from The Purl Bee, along with some additional pouches to go inside.  I'd been eyeing this tutorial for a long time, and am glad to say that it was generally super easy!  The most difficult part was sewing on some of the bias tape on the inside seams (those corners!), but thankfully those aren't visible unless you go looking for them.



Phoebe's best friend got a dachshund necklace to match her own.



I finally cut into my closely hoarded stash of voile to make a square dance scarf that I've been seeing all over Pinterest.  Such a simple, lovely project, and the voile was so wonderful to sew with that I wondered why I hadn't made anything out of it sooner!



These were my most time consuming projects of the holiday season.  From Alicia Paulson's book Stitched in Time, I was excited to finally try the patchwork picture frames project.  This was my first attempt at printing photos on fabric, and I'm amazed at how easy it turned out to be!  I picked up a package of printable fabric sheets from Joann's, and just ran them through my printer (which is nothing special or fancy) on plain paper, normal setting, and they came out perfect the first time.  Score!  You can find the full instructions in Alicia's book, of course.

Thanks for sticking around during the sporatic posting - I've got tons of stuff to show you, but I've been using every free minute to cuddle my dear little Penelope.  She's pretty much the sweetest baby in the world.