Getting ready to make merry

Our Combined Federal Campaign at work scheduled an arts and crafts silent auction on December 15, so i made two little zippered quilted bags and two embellished grapevine wreaths. Here are the bodies of the bags...they're tiny crazy quilts that i made with fabrics from my stash and some of the cool fancy stitches on my sewing machine.

And here are the two finished little bags. There was a "bidding war" over one of them which was very gratifying! (and sort of amusing, because there was only one bid on the other bag, and they look so similar, you'd think the bids would have been spread between the two bags)

Here's one of the wreaths...purchased grapevine wreath, with paper punched snowflakes, satin ribbon, chipboard letters, and a few rhinestone brads. I loved how they came out...yet neither of them was bid on. Oh well, will just have to give them to friends!

Here's the second annual card i made for the Red Truck Bakery, our local purveryor of everything delicious, from hearty Harvest Bread to sinfully delicious Double Chocolate Moonshine cakes. They have such delicious baked goods (all baked from scratch on the premises) and they are really nice folks...a great addition to Main Street.

My quilt group's annual holiday party was this past Tuesday. I've been working very full days at work, plus taking work home on evenings and weekends, so have fallen even farther behind than usual in holiday preparations. So i took annual leave on Monday and Tuesday and quilted like crazy. I made a miniature table runner for my Secret Santa, which i was so pleased to actually finish, i forgot to take a picture of it!

Each year we have a challenge block for the party, with the design chosen by the previous year's winner. (Each person who wants to, makes a block and then at the party we put our names into a basket, with one chance to win for each block that we've made. The winner gets all of the blocks!) This year the theme was "Christmas tree ornament" and the club provided an 8" square of fabric to use as the background, so all of the blocks that everyone makes will have that in common. I knew i wanted to make a ball-shaped ornament, and of course it had to have a cat on it. I found the perfect pattern in Quilting Arts Gifts magazine for actual ornaments made out of fabric. They didn't show them made up with cat fabrics, but the "cathedral window" construction was perfect to make a kitty peek out of. I made two and appliqued each one to a background block. I was so thrilled with how they came out, i made two just to be actual ornaments.