Stitching in the Barn

Happy New Year!!!! It seems like every year I start off wanting to sew and blog more. I get new quilting stuff for Christmas that I'm excited about and work slows down for me in January. Then, I get sick/depressed/busy again, forget all about blogging and last year I actually didn't get a lot of sewing in. It was a crazy year. I have 6 drafts saved up from January of last year that I didn't get to post because I didn't have the pictures ready and never got around to them. I think this will be my year to change all that. At the end of 2015, I finally got to sew something other than mending! It finally got cold here in DFW after Christmas so my daughter and I had to make our dogs sweaters. We used Simplicity 3939. I bought it on sale for under $2 a few years back. It's for smaller dogs.

My kids finished up a project each right before I caught a cold so I haven't been able to post them until now.  My son (11) made a collar for his cat Amy. We set up the Kumihimo disk with a simple blue and black yarn setup and he worked on it for quite a while until it was done. Here's Amy modeling it for us. We left the ends untrimmed so she could play with them, which she did until they came off.  My daughter (19) took Simplicity pattern #1953 and made it her own. The only animal hat she liked a little was the panda except he looks sad so she decided to make a llama instead.  She had a vintage machine that was too powerful for her to control so I gave her my easy to use Singer. She likes it a lot better and had no problem sewing this together. She designed the ears, face applique and snout. It's so cute. It was made to fit my son so he's modeling it for us. She wants to make a whole menagerie of hats now.

The other week I was browsing Quilter Blogs.com when I came across a post with a picture of a beautiful bracelet like I'd never seen before . It was made from yarn in a Japanese braiding style called Kumihimo. I immediately searched the web to find out more. I found supplies , patterns and videos . It's so simple that you can start with what you have on hand if you want but I knew I wanted the disk made from thick fun foam. I searched around for it and found it at Jo Ann's in the kids' craft section as a lanyard  maker. It was very reasonable priced with a 50% off coupon so it came home with me. 

Well this post is going to have quite a few pictures :o) I'll make them thumbnails, some with links to the full size. I finished up the two blocks I needed for blockofthemonth  last week:   These are January and February. I'll make March's block later. While sewing these, I finally remembered my leaders & enders blocks. I got one done but something went wrong with my friendship star. I don't know how this happened but I almost did it on the next one! I left this one alone and fixed the second. It looks funny but not entirely unappealing so I don't think I'm going to fix it.