Grown-up Gifts

Now that the New Hampshire Primary is finally over, I am looking forward to having a bit more time to sew and craft! Today was my first day off in 19 days. I haven’t calculated my overtime yet, but I covered more than 50 Jon Huntsman events during that time all over the state. It didn’t really hit me how tired I was until I went back to the office Wednesday. The adrenaline really kept me going!

Anyway, here are the last of the Christmas gifts I forgot to show you!

I made this quilt for my sister, using the excess fabric from my Christmas quilt. I had a bunch of strips of squares already sewn together, and my original plan was to use those to border larger squares of off-white fabric… but at some point I decided to make 1/2-square triangles instead. The top came together very quickly, though quilting those zig-zags is tedious given all the times you have to stop and pivot.

I knew I wanted this to be a cuddly throw, so I bought fleece for the backing, thinking I could skip the batting altogether. But the green showed through the white, so I ended up using batting.  As you can see, my quality-control kitties were quite pleased with the final result.

My husband helped with this next project, a set of drinking glasses made out of recycled soda bottles. We were inspired by this project  featuring wine bottles at Plastolux.com. I can’t remember where we ordered it from, but we bought the same bottle cutter featured in that post. Jason did all the cutting. He found it somewhat frustrating in that some bottles cut very evenly and others either broke into pieces or cut unevenly. Lucky for us, my father-in-law used to make stained glass stuff, so he had a sanding machine we could borrow. That made it much easier to sand the sharp edges.

They were really hard to photograph! (There actually were six glasses, one for each New England state)

We tend to drink more red wine than white, so we have a lot of dark colored bottles, which I don’t like as much in terms of turning them into tumblers. So we made this set using some soda bottles (I forget which brand, some fancy organic soda probably from our local food co-op) I used my Silhouette machine to cut vinyl stencils for the decorations and etching cream.

Our friends really loved them, so we’ll probably make more. Though this was one of those projects where we thought “We’ll make a ton of these!” and then ended up making …. one set. But we really should make more to at least get our money’s worth out of the cutter.