Some Finishes and Some Random Stuff

The other day I saw a great little tutorial on Quilty Cat's blog, and it looked so easy and fun, I had to try it. So, I took the scraps from the placemats my sister made for me (you can see them here) and did the circles. Yes, she returned the scraps to me. . . wasn't that sweet? I thought they'd make great potholders. I got the binding finished this morning and they're all ready for dinner tonight!

These really were easy to make. I cut my square @ 6 inches instead of the 8 inches Quilty Cat recommended because my scraps were small. I made the one on the right first, and I learned that just strips don't work as well as wedges. You can see that some of my "wedges" are going off in some weird directions. In the circle on the left, I trimmed the strips down into wedges and it looks better. My strips weren't too big to start with, so I ended up with some fairly small wedges, but I think it looks more ball-like. Next time I'd cut everything into the wedges. I'm thinking this block would be a great project for a collection of 60's scraps that I "inherited". But that's got to go on the back burner for a while.


While I was playing with the scraps, I decided to embellish some new kitchen towels that DH gave me for Christmas. (Ben Franklin had a great sale on - 5 towels for $10) So I used up the last of the scraps on the 2 towels on the left, then had to come up with something else for the 3rd one. Two more to go!

As I was driving the other day, I saw a sign by a house that cracked me up!

MAN STUFF

Garage Sale

How many guys do you think stopped for that one?

Jan at Be*mused blog recently took a trip to Japan, and was lucky enough to attend the Tokyo International Quilt Festival. She's started a Flickr set in which she's uploading all her quilt photos from this show. These are well worth the time to look through them. There's some incredible quilts! Oh, and she's having a blog birthday giveaway this week, including some great Japanese fabrics! Hop on over there, and leave a comment to be included in this! Start with this post, which has all the (simple) rules, and Good Luck!

Here's the latest progress on my X blocks. I'm making a couple every time I sit down at the sewing machine, so they're going slowly. But I'm making progress! So far I'm not having any troubles with the flannel either. *knocks on wood*

Speaking of blog birthdays, tomorrow will be two years for Indigo Threads! I'm putting together a giveaway in celebration, and will post about this tomorrow. So stay tuned!