2025
These are three projects I made for people close to me during the 2025 holiday season. A goal of mine when I make projects for people is to challenge myself to use techniques I haven't used before - these projects are good examples of this.
My partner is a huge Garfield fan (see the lamp in the background above) so I made him a garfield pillow based on this image copyright whoever.
I started by tracing the image off my laptop screen onto paper. I then pieced together squares of my orange fabric scraps using a similar method as my mini quilts into a shape that would encompass the garfield tracing, and traced the paper image onto the fabric with heat-erase pens (not pictured). I used the tracing as a template for embroidery with brown floss.
I appliqued yellow and white fabric to color in Garfield's mouth and eyes, and hand stitched the wrong sides of the Garfield sheet and the backing in an outline around Garfield's shape. I then stuffed him with scrap fabric and recycled shipping insulation. Now he's a cozy decorative throw pillow!
I made this mini quilt for my friend and wanted to use two techniques I was excited about: couching and crumb quilting. For the top sheet, I used my 2.5" strip piecing technique to create a checkerboard-like grid with a gap in the middle. This made it very hard to keep the dimensions even. I couched 4 strings from the rag delivery at work in a swoopy form around the top sheet. I attached a fine mesh into the gap in the top sheet to accomplish the next step.
Next, I made the crumb collage. I was inspired by this video which describes how to make an entire mini quilt using crumb sized scraps as the "top sheet." I organized my crumbs by color, cut them into even smaller pieces, and picked out the cutest pieces to collage with. I laid all the crumbs onto the batting and pinned the top sheet over the crumbs so that they showed through the mesh section. This became my quilt sandwich.
Backing up a little bit, I made the back sheet with my 2.5" strips as well. after the crumb collaging, I machine-quilted everything together in vertical lines only within the boundary defined by the couching described earlier. This picture of the back of the finished quilt shows pretty well how this was done. I'm super proud of this quilt!
This was made for my friend, with her baby cat in mind. It was my first time trying log cabin piecing! I of course used my 2.5" strips, with a 4.5" (including seam allowance) square in the middle. It was very meditative and satisfying to chain piece each of the 4 log cabin blocks simultaneously. I machine quilted this and it's filled with the same recycled insulation batting.
