A basket full of felt fruit

I sure hope Little Imp enjoys her basket full of fruit for Christmas!

I ended up making 2 baskets that fit inside each other so Little Imp can mix and match, shop and sort to her heart's content.  One day I might get around to posting the instructions for the baskets, but for now here is a picture instead.

Here are links to all the felt fruit and veg I have made so far:

Felt apple
Felt strawberry
Felt carrot
Felt lemon
Felt lemon halves
Felt tomato
Felt cucumber
Felt beans and bean pod
Felt banana
Felt pear

Christmas Tree Skirt

I started working on this at the beginning of the year, stopping and starting sewing in between all the other projects I've been up to and finally finished it a few months ago.

The idea came from this mod mosaic floor pillow tutorial by Elizabeth Hartman. I wanted a sort of stained glass window feel and this idea really lent itself to that.

I must admit it was a whole lot trickier than I thought, mostly I think because of trying to be a bit to stingy with the fabric scraps in each wedge and then finding that all 6 wedges didn't quite match up at the end.

I used the mod mosaic pattern idea to make up 6 wedge shapes that then joined together to form a circle.  I measured and cut a wedge template out of butchers paper to use as a rough guide to lay out each wedge.

 Then I gradually attached dark green strips around each patterned piece of fabric, cut to form straight edges and then attached the next piece of fabric or green strip and so on...  This is where, if I ever made this pattern again, I would have not been worried about probably having to cut away fabric at the end and made each wedge bigger than the template.  Much easier to cut fabric away at the end than be a few inches too short & then have to unpick and recut and restitch....believe me!

Once each of the wedges was done I attached them each together with long green strip but left an opening between 2 of the wedges as this would eventually be the opening to fit around the Christmas tree.

I ended up deciding not to do any fancy quilting for the Tree Skirt.  I found a cheap green queen sized bed skirt /valance at an op shop and used this as the underside fabric.  For the middle layer I decided to use a thickish felt.
The picture below shows the wedges connected together and then the whole circle placed on thick felt with the gold binding placed around the edge before anything being measured/cut out.

I finished the skirt like a standard quilting sandwich, pinning the 3 layers (green sheet fabric, felt and top layer) together and then quilting - straight lines along each edge of the 'spokes' or edges of the wedges and some more straight line borders around some of the feature fabric pieces within each wedge.
Then I measured and cut out the circle in the centre and measured and trimmed the outer edge before sewing on the binding.  Ta da!

Pa Rum Pum Pum Pum...

Armchair Recover and Applique

I've up cycled another armchair.  This time it was for my parents, so I thought I'd better not embellish it quite as much as I did for the armchair recover and applique I finished for Little Imp a while ago!

The original chair is a covered Ikea model that was faded and stained. The 'upcycling' involved making a removable cover that fits reasonably snugly over the chair, recovering the box-ish shaped cushion, and then ...because I couldn't help myself...adding on a few bits of applique.