Christmas Placemats, Napkins and Table Runner

I made placemats and napkins for my cousin and her spouse.  The napkins were made following this tutorial by Donna Jordan from Jordan Fabrics.  You can see stitching lines on the opened napkin which gives you guidelines on how to fold the napkins.

I made some Christmas Tree blocks and partial blocks following this tutorial by Lori Holt from Bee in my Bonnet and turned them into coordinating placemats.

I also made a placemat for my father who is 92 with some fabric showing vintage toys and decorations.

I also made this table runner based on a quilt pattern again by Lori Holt of Bee in my Bonnet called Bringing Home the Christmas Tree which can be found in her Vintage Christmas Book.  This picture taken without flash shows the true colours of the runner better.  When I was little, we had a red station wagon, without the wings, but this reminded me of it so I had to make it.

This picture with flash shows the texture of the quilting much better - snowflakes, of course!

This picture shows the runner and a few other Christmas projects from previous years.  I'll blog about the bag in a future post.

Sorry about the dullness of most of these pictures, but we were having rather dull rainy weather when the pictures were taken.

Christmas Sewing

I saw a quilt and was intrigued with the way the trees were made so decided to experiment with it and came up with this quilt block.  I like how the silhouette of the tree is simple but the zigzag gives the tree depth.  I think the spotted fabric makes the tree look like it has been decorated.  I'm going to make three more in different greens but with the same spotted fabric trim and the central red corner stone will act like a tree topper on each of them.  It will make a nice table topper.  Before I can finish it though, I need to find some more white tone on tone snowflake fabric.

I don't know if anyone else has come up with this idea or not, but I repurposed a Keurig coffee pod holder to hold my large spools of thread instead.

I've been using it for a couple of weeks now and it work great!