Patriotic Kitchen Decorations

    I had to make some patriotic hanging dish towels for my family.  I'm sending these off to my two brothers.  I have to make four more, two for me and two for my daughter.  I love the red, white and blue fabric and I was really lucky to find those beautiful navy blue kitchen towels to go with the fabric.  We can use these from Memorial Day until Labor Day. 

An Ohio Star Block Decoration And More

     I made this Ohio Star Block to hang somewhere.  This block was a lot of fun to make and I enjoyed stash diving to find the fabrics for it.  I used the instructions in a video by Amanda of 3and3quarters blog.  The link to her video is right here.

    This is a nice big block.  It finishes at 14" x 14".  Later I'll be making a door decoration using three of these blocks and some stash fabrics.  I would love to make a quilt using this block, but I have several quilt projects on my list already, so that will have to wait.

   I have a pile of fabrics on my cutting table waiting to be cut for fabric trees, two will be made with cute Arctic Antics fabric I made my rag quilt from.  See a picture at this post here.   Another tree will be pink for my bedroom made with fat quarters from the Far, Far Away fabric line (see picture below), and one will be made with some miscellaneous blue fat quarters I found (picture below) to make a sewing table decoration.

    Today I picked up some bar mop kitchen towels to make some new hanging dishtowels for DD's kitchen.  I will be using some of my precious Time With Friends by Lynette Anderson fabric (see below) to make the fabric section to create the button holes.  DD asked for gray, maroon, and white fabrics and this is the perfect combination plus she loves dogs and cats.

 

     There are tons of tutorials on line and the last time I made some I used a tutorial that had me make bias binding for ties.  I want to make one with a buttonhole this time, because I just learned how to make buttonholes on my Janome machine and I'd like to get some more experience used that cool foot, plus you don't need all that extra fabric for buttonholes.  Let's face it when I make bias binding, I waste some fabric and I'm not going to waste any of the only yard of this lovely Time With Friends fabric.  Here is the hanging dishtowel tutorial that I will be using for this project.

       

 

Found A Quick Way To Make My Shower Curtain Quilt

   So I'm sewing along on my tote bag projects and watching videos on the computer and I found a great way to make quilty shower curtain.  I love the Big Star quilt pattern and last year I made a quilt using the pattern.  I made the stars with 10" and 5" squares.  So easy and so much fun to make.  This is a picture of the quilt top before I sandwiched it.

   So I went stash diving yesterday to find big pieces of fabrics to cut 20" squares for my shower curtain star.  My star measures 52" x 52".  I'm going to add borders to make it bigger.  I want it to measure  at least 68 x 68".  To finish it I will add a backing fabric, do some straight line quilting, and put 12 buttonholes at the top to hang it.  Not a good picture, but it's not finished yet.  

   I finished all my tote bags.  I made four of them.  Super fun and really useful.  It was kind of hard for me to get a picture of all of them together.  Now I have some tote bags that match my bedroom curtains.  Fun stuff.

     

   I also finished my potholders that will be my hostess gift for Thanksgiving dinner.