Two Christmas presents done!

Today I finished the quilted Mod Bento Block pillow for a Christmas gift! I'm not sure if the person who will recieve this reads my blog regularly. So I'm not going to mention who it's for. :) Hehe... I like how it turned out, even though I had a couple problems with the assembly. One of which was running out of that generic yellow thread that I quilted it with (which came in a bin from my grandma)! I ended up finishing the rest of it with the bobbin, then adding a bit more quilting with brown on the one edge. I don't think it looks bad... but that was very frustrating. 

Another thing, when doing free motion quilting, always be sure to pull your bobbin thread up after replacing the bobbin. I somehow forgot this, and ended up punching several holes through my feed dog cover! Now that's a powerful machine! I'll have to take some pictures of it tomorrow. It looks like it got into a shoot-out!

Then after completing this I decided to move on to the next present. I don't think my brother reads this at all, so I think I'm safe to tell you all that I made him a "transformer's" pillowcase. Several months ago my brother went to a toga party, and bought several yards of cheep transformer's fabric to wear as a toga... after the party he passed the fabric to me knowing that I sew. lol. Well he's getting more than just the pillowcase, but I think he'll like it anyway. :)

As always, linking up to Fabric Tuesday on Quiltstory

French Seams!

I just made something with french seams! Really! For some reason I thought they'd be harder than they were! Earlier this week I had made a pillowcase for DH... with awesome bike fabric trim. Well today I wanted to sew, but being that I just embarked on a huge project for Rosemarie, I don't want to start anything else big. So I decided to make myself a pillowcase. I used this great fabric that I got from the One Yard Wonders sweepstakes win (one yard of fabric delivered to my door each month for a year - awesome right?), "Sparrow" by Alexander Henry. I love the fabric but the colors aren't really something I can see myself using in a quilt... so I chopped into it and used almost the entire yard for my pillowcase (just a little two inch strip left, from the selvedge).

I used a 1.5" strip of black and white saftey pin fabric as an accent, and used this tutorial from Film in the Fridge. It took just a little more time and energy than the other pillowcase I made, but it was well worth it. I wish I had seen this tutorial before I'd made DH's pillowcase!

Notice the bike fabric on Wally's pillow. AMAZING! I loooove it! Now to go sleep.

You're probably wondering why there's no pictures? My camera battery is dead and I've had to order a new charger since it has been lost in the land of "the two year old picked it up." lol. I'll have Wally take a pic on his cell phone tonight to be posted.

****Edited to add pics****

(magically neither pillowcase matches anything else in our bedroom... they don't even match eachother. lol.)