Court turns 26, and crafty gifting from the holidays.

Wow. It's been a while, but not for a lack of crafting. Some of the holiday gift pics had to be held until after the season passed, so now that these have been received, I can finally show them off. :) Oh, I couldn't resist putting a pic of the kitties even though it's a fuzzy one - they were helping me finish wrapping up gifts before shipping the box off to Oregon and were quite mesmerized by the candle.

This clutch went to my sister, Courtney, for Christmas. The pattern is once again from the Bend the Rules Sewing book by Amy Karol. It was actually relatively quick easy to make - in hindsight, I guess. The whole process always takes longer than you think from choosing the fabrics, doing all the marking and cutting, then finally getting to the fun part - the sewing. :)

It was really fun to figure out the fabrics to use with this project - for the inside and out. I ended up going with a more 'evening' look and dressed it up some with the satin and suede on the outside, then some pretty Joel Dewberry fabric (Aviary collection) for the lining. I had a lot of super cool buttons to choose from thanks to Danielle's button donation last year (thanks, Dan!).

Angela made several of these clutches for girls in her family, and she surprised me with one at Christmas! It's gorgeous and come to find out, I helped pick out the fabric for my own present - ha! Apparently, she just chose the fabric I had uber-gushed over when we were helping each other match up outer and lining fabrics from the stash. I'll post a pic of it soon - hopefully along with more of Angela's holiday gifts.

We did have a tad bit of trouble (again) with the turning / flipping aspect, but maybe practice makes perfect because I really think we have it now. It took some time looking at the discussion threads of the BTR flickr group and reading some of the other BTR patterns in the book to get it. I'll report with our interpretation of the instructions in the next post with Angela's clutches to explain where our confusion was and hopefully explain it in a different way that people like us can understand. ;-)

This scarf also went to Court - for her 26th birthday. I felt so ahead of the game working on it for quite some time before her birthday, but somehow ended up blocking it at my uncle's house in Wisconsin over Thanksgiving and mailing it from there, since her birthday is very early in December. I really liked the way it turned out - it's the most complicated pattern I've attempted thus far and the bobbles were wacky fun.

The free pattern is from the Jimmy Beans Wool site and I used the same brand of yarn, Lorna Laces Shepherd Worsted, that comes in incredibly rad color combos. I love their solid colors, but especially covet all of the multicolored colorways. One skein is enough for most of the free 'scarf of the month' patterns on Jimmy Beans.

I probably shouldn't point out mistakes, but in this case a mistake was designed in thanks to Angela's suggestion after I realized several pattern repeats into the scarf that somehow the first pattern instance was reversed - right side stitch on the wrong side, etc. Since it was the first section, I just left it that way and made sure to make the last section reversed to match. Gotta love the merging of mistakes with a pattern to make it even better! :D

This hat was finished several months ago. I found the yarn and knew I would make something for my mom with it - it's really the most gorgeous yarn I've ever owned - it's a Berroco Jasper yarn. Originally, I guess I was thinking scarf because I bought two skeins and balled both of them. The hat only used one skein, so I still have one to use for something else one day - maybe a little neck wrap for mom - we shall see.

So, the pattern is just a standard hat pattern, but with a bit of a different band at the bottom - a wider band with the seed stitch. I've been lovin' on the seed stitch lately - it really adds nice texture. It feels a bit feminine to me, but that could just be me. You can't even really see the seed stitch in this pic, but trust me, it's cool. ha.

While the actual hat was finished months ago, I ended up adding a little to it, since the original plan for my mom's gift was to have more with it - but I'm holding off with that project for her birthday. So.. I decided to just amp up the hat with some fleece lining around the ears. A friend has a hat with fleece lining and she has always raved about it, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. It was really easy - just cut out a strip of fleece (first I measure all the way around the inside bottom of the hat), sew the strip together to make a band (by hand or machine), then handstitch the band into the hat. This stitch is a rolled stitch that I learned from this tutorial on the purl bee site. Just grab stitches that show on the inside of the hat and use any color thread, since it won't show with this stitch. You could also use a blind stitch or any other stitch that won't show - or you could use a contrasting thread and purposely show it, for that matter - go wild! ;-)