Craft-stravaganza

Given that we now live where there's winter, and it is, in fact, winter, AND we don't really have a yard that gets direct sun, my non-work attention has been shifted from gardening to crafting. I've actually been pretty productive over the past while, but since most of my craft projects are gifts, I tend not to post. But I've decided that's silly. So here are a few photos of a small quilt that took me, oh, like 10 months to finish. Most of that time it spent half-quilted, sans binding in a drawer, but I finally got it together to finish it.

I bought the main fabrics (from fatquartershop.com) so long ago that it apparently is no longer available, but it's Outfoxed - Outwitted by Lizzy House. And I'd like to claim I was totally in to foxes before they were trendy, but, well, I bought fox fabric, so that doesn't really play out, does it? Here's another view:

This is the third (I think) quilt I've made, so it has definitely been a learning process. The patterns for this one and another one (that I maybe have no photos of? whoops) are from a little book called 'Lots of Scraps, It's Time to Quilt', which has generally been super useful for using up tiny bits of fabric. I'm not such a fan of lots of the colors that get used in quilts, but it's pretty easy to see how a pattern could work with a different color scheme. The biggest blooper on this quilt was trying to machine "stitch in the ditch" without a walking foot, which is apparently a magical thing (I have one on back-order right now). I ended up with some fabric stretching/folding in a couple of spots, but I think it'll be okay. One more photo:

I'm also hoping that this year will lead to learning to better use my dSLR, but so far that is just a plan... I'm working on quilts four and five right now, so I won't share those till they're done, but I did find myself feeling bad about the number of skinny strips of fabric I was putting in the trash, so I made this:

I happen to be working on very colorful projects, so getting all the colors was easy, then it's just a wire wreath frame, wrapped with some more wire for more places to tie, and about a bajillon 2-3 inch long, 0.25 - 0.5 inch wide strips of fabric. And three movies and five episodes of the Daily Show (give or take). Happy 2013! Hopefully I'll be here more often this year. Maybe.