I made a couple of sets of microwave bowls as Christmas gifts.

Although it doesn’t show, the outside of these bowls is also the polka dot fabric.

This was the December project that I worked on with Stacia and Deloise. They were both finishing up the book, while I still have three more projects to go.

Since it was December I purposely picked Christmas fabrics; the stars on the edges seemed to beg for Christmas fabrics. Things were going well and I had the centre finished (from scraps of Christmas fabrics) when I noticed that the measurements were off. If the centre wasn’t the right size those stars weren’t going to work on the border. I took the centre apart and was able to trim down the four-patches and put everything back together again and make it the right size.

The stars in the pattern were done with templates. After a couple of tries I realized I wasn’t ever going to get the stars right so I made my own paper-pieced pattern. It took a few tries to perfect the pattern but I finally got it right. I worried that I would run out of the fabrics I picked for the stars but, in the end, I had lots.

I used my new-to-me quilting method of free style curved lines in the centre and a cross hatch on the stars.

I debated giving this one away but with all the work I put into it I decided to keep it for myself.

These are the projects I worked on at Panorama when Stacia, Deloise and I were together for a week of sewing. That week of sewing turned into only about three days of sewing for me as I was ill and everything I touched seemed to be a disaster.

The tops were done before I left Panorama but I had no desire to quilt them. When I was quilting other projects for Christmas I decided it was time to at least get them sandwiched. And, once they were sandwiched, it was relatively easy to get them quilted as they are small.

All these projects are from the book Little Handfuls of Scraps by Edyta Sitar.

Gail and I have a small bag of projects that we want to work on. When one project is (more or less) done we draw another slip to see what we do next. This project was one we did because we wanted to use her GO-Cutter.

It was very slick to cut the flower petals and much easier than tracing them using Steam-A-Seam. The top was finished and sandwiched quite quickly but then I started second-guessing myself. Can I used narrowly-spaced straight lines to stitch the appliqué? Should I have stitched down the appliqué before I quilted it? How would I stitch down the appliqué pieces?

In the end, I chose to quilt the sandwich but, rather than using straight lines, I used randomly placed free-motion curved lines. This was a technique that I saw in a demo at the Saskatoon Quilt Show. I’ve had the book that was being highlighted for years but, to be honest, I’ve only used it for my 8-pointed star.

The piece was quilted, bound and completed in one afternoon. Why do I wait so long to get things done?