lots going on this month

The dog is still cute. She likes to cuddle, but she also likes to spaz out and leap into the air. Such a complex creature.

My dad makes 'cabs' from rocks that he finds on his travels, and which he purchases from quality sellers. He does his own wire-wrapping. This one is a tiger-eye stone, wrapped in a gold-coloured square wire. It doesn't look very gold in the photo. It's not a super-yellow gold in real life. My dad rocks. Pun intended.

Someone in my modern quilt guild made this table topper for me for our Christmas swap. It's kind of amazing, right?

I bought CynthiaFrenette's pillow form (okay, I bought three) on Spoonflower.com  and sewed them up. Auntie TwoBrokenLegs likes hers, which says Hello Lovely and has an old typewriter image on it. Yes, she actually broke both of her legs recently - while standing still on wet leaves and while wearing shoes with no tread. Fibulas be damned! Daughter loves her pillow, which has a chicken on it and it says Fly Your Freak Flag. Very clever cushions.

I finished sewing the binding on all 32 coasters. It was an adventure in Netflix. Sewing black fabric with black thread in the evening is something of a guessing game. I think I did a pretty good job on them, but will anyone ever really know?

The Rubik's kid has a sister. I felt bad, so I offered her some pillowcases. Her room is done in mint green, white and a bit of gray. So there are two pillowcases in opposite colour arrangements. I had leftover fabric, so of course I cut a bunch of squares to do half-square triangles four at a time on the bias. Here's a link to something that can explain the pros and cons of these half-square triangle squares.

Then I went to visit Auntie TwoBrokenLegs and I noticed that she needed a table runner. I offered to make her one, and then I offered to make it double-sided. I'm on a half-square triangle kick, so I started something that would become an ironing-and-squaring-up challenge .... I now have about 300 squares.

They started out as 5.5 inch squares of fabric. I put two of them right sides together and sewed around the outside. Then I cut them twice on the diagonal to get four bias squares that are made of two triangles.

See? They'll be something like 3.5-inch squares, but I have a feeling that I may need to square them up to 3.25 or even 3 inches. We'll see.

So the ones on the pillowcases below are for the bed topper and then the big stack of triangles is one side of the table runner, and the squares that are open are for the other side of the table runner. 300 squares. That's a lot of ironing. I haven't started the squaring-up yet, but I'll get on that this afternoon.

Thank goodness for Christmas holidays! I wish you all a very happy holiday and the very, very best in 2016. It's a leap year, so take a leap into something new and see where it takes you.

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