Christmas Projects

I have spent this week working away on Christmas projects. I can't show you any, but they are really cool and I am very happy with the outcome.

Here are some of the supplies for one of them:

Aren't the colors pretty? You might recognize the labels as coming from Joann's.  They had a great sale all week  - $1 fat quarters. I bought a bunch, I couldn't help it.  Their fabric is definitely low quality and I would never use it in a quilt, but for sewing and craft projects it seems to work fine.

HOWEVER, Joann's has the horrible habit of putting those "fabric quarters" stickers directly onto the fabric! (WHYYYYYY?) So, I have a bunch of fat quarters with sticker residue on them because the stickers never come off cleanly.  Anyone have suggestions for how to get the sticker remnants off of my fabric?

In other news, I recovered my ironing board!

This fabric is linen and is from the line "field study." I have admired it for some time but never bought any because I didn't know what the heck to do with linen. Then another blog I follow (I have forgotten who) made an ironing board cover from this fabric, and I was inspired to do the same.  

There are a lot of tutorials online for how to make one of these, and this was incredibly easy! I bought a bath towel, trimmed it to match the top of the board, and put it under the fabric as batting. Then I sewed a tube made from old binding strips around the edge of the fabric (also loosely trimmed to the shape of the board), put some yarn in it, and drew it tight like a drawstring. DONE!

I have to admit, having fabric this bright is a teeny bit distracting when I am ironing, but it's so pretty I am sure I will get used to it.  Plus I left the old cover on underneath so if I want to go back to bland beige I can just pop this cover off.

As a side note, I recently became unemployed. It sucks, but I am sure glad I have a hobby. I don't know what everyone else who is unemployed does all day. You can only look at job boards for so long. Having sewing projects to work gives me goals to accomplish each day and makes me feel productive. I try to switch between a bit of job searching and a bit of sewing throughout the day. All this extra sewing time is enabling me to get a lot more done than I otherwise would have (I wasn't even going to sew Christmas presents this year because I didn't feel I had time or inspiration...) Once these presents are done, I am hoping to tackle a bunch of UFOs and get them off of my plate so I can have a clean, fresh sewing start to 2014.