adventures of a quilting diva

Here’s a fun little pin cushion I designed for the June 2009 issue of Cotton Spice web magazine. You can make it with a bottle cap and scraps of batting and fabric. Find the instructions on page 10. (Click here to open PDF. Be patient while it loads, this is a 76-page jam-packed issue! It includes lots of green ideas: a tutorial on how to upcycle an old lamp shade, crochet a rug from fabric scraps, as well as darning tips and lots of fun quilt patterns. Don’t miss Beth Brubaker’s article, Quilter’s Playground: Frugal Fashions on page 58 for fun ideas for using up fabric scraps.)

Remember the classic Necco Sweethearts Valentine’s candy hearts? Now they’re available in new Red, White & You colors for Independence Day. Red, White & You Sweethearts will be included in care packages to U.S. military troops and feature patriotic messages such as: My Hero, Miss You, and Home Safe. And they have new great-tasting flavors too. (strawberry, blueberry and vanilla crème … Mmmmm!) They’re a perfect inspiration for Fourth of July crafting.

Here are some fun and crafty ideas for using Red, White & You Sweethearts in your Fourth of July festivities.

First is the Red, White & You Patriotic Shaker. You can find complete directions for this and other easy crafts in the Sweethearts Patriotic Crafts for Kids booklet. Since I didn’t have all the exact supplies, I made do with what I had. I used an empty candy sprinkles plastic jar in place of the flip-top container and 20″ lengths of 1/8″ and 1/4″ wide ribbons, tied in the middle around the metal brad before sticking it through the lid. I tied red, white and blue pony beads onto the ends of the ribbons.

Next is the Folk Art Heart Party Favor. Cut two 3-1/4″ tall x 3″ wide pieces of wool felt (or you could use craft felt if you wish) and a strip 1-1/4″ wide x 9-1/2″ long. Cut a heart out of the middle of one of the panels and blanket stitch with 2 strands of embroidery floss around the opening. (Scroll down to the bottom of this post for the pattern. Click on the image and then print out the full-size pattern.) Click here for a great tutorial on blanket stitching on felt from Future Girl Craft Blog. (Variation: cut a heart out of a contrasting piece of felt and use blanket stitch to appliqué it onto the panel.) Blanket stitch one panel to each long side of the strip. Wool can sometimes be stretchy. If the strip stretches out past the edges of the panels, just trim it down to size. Put a box of Red, White & You candies inside the pouch.

Or use a small bag of Red, White & You Sweethearts to make a quick and easy Mini Favor. Simply cut a 6″ to 7″ square out of patriotic fabric with pinking shears or a wave rotary cutter, place the bag of candy in the center, gather the fabric around it and tie with a 1/8″ wide ribbon. Tie mini pony beads onto the ends of the ribbon if you’d like.

And finally my favorite, the Red, White & You Candy Dish Rug. You will need two circles of wool felt. I used a lid to trace around. My circles are 7-1/4″ across. That’s about the smallest circle that will handle four hearts. You can cut a larger circle and give more space in between the hearts or enlarge or reduce the size of the heart pattern for a different size rug if you wish. Check your candy dish to see what is a good size for you.

Next trace four hearts onto fusible web (click on pattern image at the bottom of this post for full-size heart pattern that you can print) and fuse polka dot cotton quilting fabric to the hearts, cut them out and fuse the hearts to one of the wool circles. Note: when you fuse the hearts to the wool circle, use the wool setting on the iron, you don’t want to scorch the wool.

Blanket stitch (click here for Future Craft Girl’s blanket stitch tutorial) around the hearts with two strands of embroidery floss, then blanket stitch the second wool felt circle to the bottom of the rug. (Variation: use solid wool felt hearts, no fusible web necessary, and embroider Red, White & You messages onto the hearts before embroidering them to the circle.)

Why not gather together some Red, White & You candy hearts, red, white and blue fabric, scrapbooking papers, beads, trims and embellishments and see what you’re inspired to make …

If you’d like to sponsor a USO Care Package and send a personal message to encourage a deployed U.S. service member, click here for the USO/Sweethearts secure donation page.

Last weekend I turned my kitchen into a piñata factory, making chili pepper piñatas for Cinco de Mayo centerpieces. My daughter prefers strawberries to chili peppers, so the half-finished one in the back is going to be a strawberry (we’re going to cut green tissue paper leaves for around the stem and add tiny bits of black tissue paper for the seeds).

While sticking bits of old phone book pages and tissue paper to my piñatas I discovered the allure of collage. I love the way the text peeked through the transparancy of the tissue paper. It would be fun to explore collage further, except perhaps not with the Yellow Pages. I don’t think people would appreciate having their names and telephone listings immortalized into a piece of artwork. It might be neat to try something out with scraps of fabric as well, kind of like Snippet Sensations meets paper mache. I’m also considering designing a chili pepper quilt (got the chili pepper fabric already waiting to go!) Trying something you’ve never done before leads to more ideas for more new things and so on and so on.

As you can see the chili peppers turned out quite cute! If you want to make a piñata yourself, here’s a link (To make the balloon into more of a pepper shape I cut up cereal boxes and taped a cone of cardboard to the bottom of the balloon before I started the paper mache layers.) Piñatas aren’t hard to make. It might be just the thing to wake up your muse and inspire your next creative adventure. =(^_^)=

The March issue of Cotton Spice was released today on PDF. Here is my project, found on page 14, a needle keeper that for all you beaders out there, also holds tubes of beads and doubles as a beading mat. There are quite a few quilt patterns as well. I flipped through it with the intent of choosing my favorite one so I could tell you all about it, but could not decide. So you’ll have to go to www.cottonspice.com (it’s free!) and decide for yourself.

This weekend we attended a birthday party complete with a petting zoo. Annika liked holding the bunnies, but I couldn’t resist the chocolate brown Merino lambs (below).

(Actually according to Morehouse Farm, brown sheep are actually black sheep whose wool has been bleached from being out in the sunshine.) Brown or black, I wanted to give those lambs a good shearing and go play with my needle felting machine.