Pouches from candy bags

 I attempted to make a zipper pouch today, using the Missouri Star Quilt Company tutorial.  You can find that here.  All went well until it was time to turn the pouch right side out.  Then there were major issues:

This tutorial has you quilt your wrapper to batting and lining fabric.  I set my stitch length pretty high, but the shiny vinyl didn't want to feed through my sewing machine very well.  It resulted in a very short stitch length (despite being set at 3.5 on my Baby Lock).  When I attempted to turn the pouch right side out, it tore along several of the quilting stitches.  The stitches were close together, and acted as a perforation.  So, after much frustration, I found a different tutorial, one that didn't include quilting the front and back of the bag.  See this tutorial here.  

This is what I ended up making:

What will I do different next time?  I will not use a clear candy bag!  I purposely put the lining in with the front side inside out, so the cute fabric would show through.  There are other things that I don't like showing through the clear vinyl, like seams, etc.  It's a great tutorial though, and I will definitely use it again.  I do have one more bag of the Kit Kats, but it hasn't been opened yet........ I might have to open it soon and try again!

A few projects

It has been a long time since I've been here!  I have a lot of pictures to show you..... we'll see how this goes posting them!   

I started working on a bullseye quilt, found in this book, Quilts from Aunt Amy, written by the gals at Country Threads.  It's just a few years old...... 

Instead of neutral backgrounds, I decided to go bold, and had the perfect stack of fat quarters to use.  I should have taken a picture of the fat quarter stack, but of course I didn't think that far ahead.  Here are a few of the blocks.  I have 48 of them done, which is exactly what the pattern calls for!

Here are a few of them arranged on the floor.  The top photo was taken with flash.

This photo is taken without flash.  I'd say these are truer colors.

My oldest granddaughter is having a birthday in a couple of weeks.  I made one of these little beds from a Sterilite under the bed tote.  I guess I only have one picture of it to show you..... This should be the right size for an American Girl style doll.

I got her the Chesea doll as part of her Christmas gift.  My pictures posted in reverse order from what I had intended.  So we started with the most recent and working back.  Anyhow, I thought this little Chelsea doll was pretty cute with the sewing machine and dressform.

This one is assembled and ready to go to the quilter.  

I made a plus quilt for a fundraiser for our city's quasquicentennial (125th) celebration.  Ticket sales have started rather slowly.  I am not sure when they will have the drawing.

Not a very good picture here but I made an 18-patch quilt for a friend of mine.  Most of the strips came from our quilt guild's "trash to cash" sale.  Not only did they make this quilt, but also the next one pictured.

The one below is backed in flannel, and so warm and cozy!

This beauty and the best quilt #1 of 2 coordinating quilts that I made for my granddaughters for Christmas.  I made this one first, it is for baby sister, who is 6 months old.  I failed to get a photo of big sister's quilt.  I used theYellow Brick  Road pattern from Atkinson Designs.    

I'll stop here.  I had more photos to post, but not sure where they went when I was trying to add them to the blog!