Small Christmas Quilts for Decorations

I finally finished something I started so long ago I actually don't remember when I started it.  

Christmas Bells.

This is one in a series of several small wall quilts I'd started all at the same time. I completed the applique, piecing and quilting of all of the mini quilts with only the embellishment with embroidery to be done last.  And that's when the entire project came to a screeching halt after I'd finished about four of these little projects. I got halfway through the Christmas Bells that I have just finished and stopped. Now I still have six more to finish.

There's the angle quilt that still needs at least hair embroidered.

The snowflake that isn't frilly enough. I plan to do some embroidery in white around the white snowflake shape.

And several Christmas trees that have no decorations. 

Obviously sitting and doing embroidery is not one of my favorite pastimes but I do appreciate and admire beautiful embroidery.

Thanks for reading. 

Aileen 

A couple things I did this week

Another mini journal. 

This is the fourth so far and it's hard to see the difference in this photo but the paper in this one has been tea stained. I'm working on an idea for mini memento journals with old looking (tea stained) paper with aged photos printed on some of the pages. That's a story for another post. 

And Christmas dish towels. 

This is the Christmas project I've been working on for weeks now.  It is a dish towel (or four from one yard of printed fabric) I designed and had printed at Spoonflower. There is a much longer story here but suffice it to say I achieved what I set out to do, it just took more time and work than I thought it would. 

Thanks for reading. 

Aileen 

Status Update - Leather Projects

Ok, this is an experiment. Because I apparently find writing a complete blog post painfully restricting and seemingly impossible to complete. I am going to attempt the 'status update' format of Facebook or Google+  for my blog entries. No one reads the long posts anyway, right, if they read anything at all.  It's all about the photos and less than 140 words in today's world. So I am going to write more frequent, but shorter and less 'informative' posts. 

In the last week I've been working with leather. 

I made two miniature leather journals and a medicine bag. 

The leather is all from inexpensive bags of scraps you can buy by the pound. I've never worked in leather before. It's rather tough to sew. You need special needles and thread and tools like a leather punch and a very sharp stanly knife. But it smells sooo good.

I have plans for more journals and bags and possibly jewelry pieces or embellishments.