SMS Giveaway Day: Coasters & Materials

Hello and welcome to Newly Wife!  We are so excited to have all of you visiting from Sew Mama Sew.  Emily and I each wanted to share a little love with all of our crafty readers out there.  [So make sure you check out her giveaway below, as well!!]  I put together a fun package with Charlie Brown Christmas coasters and material from my most recent trip to Hawaii.

Each fabric is a fat quarter of fun material.  There are hula dancing bunnies, fortune cookies & takeout boxes, as well as little islands and hula girls.  I am also adding hot cocoa, to go with the coasters.

I made these coasters for a certain someone for Christmas, and was going to sell the other 3 sets.  Then I realized that I could not sell them, because the characters are licensed.  Now I get the joy of giving them away to lovely bloggers out there.

If you are interested in winning this prize, just follow the instructions.  Make sure to leave your email in the comment form.  Here are your chances to win, make sure you leave a comment for each item:

  1. Leave a comment telling me what your favorite holiday drink is (and we may feature it later this month).
  2. Check out my etsy shop and tell me what you would like to see or what your favorite item is.
  3. Tweet about this giveaway.
Good luck!  This giveaway ends at 2 pm (PST) on Friday, Dec. 17.  Only three entries per person/IP address.  I will be giving away a package identical to this on Crochet Every Day.  Check it out if you want a few more chances to win.  :)  Also, you should definitely check out all of the other giveaways by clicking on the picture below…

Elf Christmas Stocking Tutorial

In decorating for our first Christmas together, I found out that Matt’s stocking was going to be staying at his parents house. My stocking was knitted by one of my great aunts, so I just couldn’t imagine one of those standard drug store stockings hanging next to it. So last year, I made him a new one based on ones I saw in Ballard Designs.

Matt said he didn’t have any requests as long as it was big. So I headed over to Joann’s Fabrics and picked up two yards of a candy stripe pattern, about a yard of matching green, some batting and green thread. In total, I think it was about $10 or $15. The Christmas fabric was on sale and the green was just the remnants of a clearance bolt. This was only my second or third sewing project, so you might want to keep that in mind.

To make a pattern, trace/draw on a piece of paper grocery bag or other piece of paper. This started out huge, but for various reasons, it got much smaller. So go big when you’re tracing!

This is what I call "visual" tracing. I put my stocking on the broken down grocery bag to see what the general scale was.

Here's my sketch of the stocking. In hindsight, I should have made this pattern piece even bigger.

You should only need this one pattern that will be used to cut out four pieces of the “stocking body” fabric and two pieces of batting.

Here's what you'll be working with for the body of the stocking. Note that if you have a stripe or patterned fabric, you'll want to think about how the front and back pieces will go before you start tracing and cutting.

Next, you’ll pin these pieces together. I sewed each set of fabric and batting together and attached the green panel (already hemmed at the bottom) to the top. Inside out, I then sewed the two body stocking pieces together. After flipping the right side out, I joined the green flaps together.

As you can imagine, doing that much sewing starts to cut down on the size of the finished stocking. One way to avoid this could be to use a thinner batting, another would be to make a bigger pattern and maybe you could sew all six pieces (four fabric pieces and two batting pieces) all at once. Again — I’m no pro and it’s been a year since I made this.

Finish it off with a scrap of the body fabric as a tab.

Matt's finished stocking!

Hopefully that made sense. If I were you, I’d also add a jingle bell on the end of the curled toe. Have you made any holiday decorations?

Tutorial: Baby Shower Bunting

Remember Emily’s awesome post last week about planning a baby shower?  Well I was asked to make a bunting for that shower.  Buntings are very easy to make and you can whip one up in just a couple minutes.

The reversible animal print / rubber ducky bunting

Well, the time frame is closer to an hour, but it is still a quick project.  I created one triangle as a guide, and then cut out 9 triangles in each of 4 fabrics.  Then I cut 3-inch strips of a solid color to create my hem tape / binding.  Once you have everything cut out, stack the triangles with wrong sides together and sew along the 2 long edges, making sure to leave enough room to cut with your pinking shears.

Sewing along the homemade hem tape

Then I spaced the triangles along the hem tape and sewed it together.  I folded the end in so that that it was clean and sharp looking.  I really hope this project made sense.  It is late at night and I just got back from a long trip (trust me, another post is coming about that), so it may not make sense.

A onesie with a tiny bunting to match

I made the bunting reversible with rubber ducky fabric on one side, because the shower was rubber ducky themed, and with jungle fabric on the other side.  I was able to make things for the rest of the nursery with the jungle themed fabric, seeing as their nursery theme is jungle.

A quilt with the 2 jungles fabrics and a few others to match

A little A (for their last name) on a fleece blanket from the jungle fabric.

The whole gift

I loved making the bunting for Sarah — and creating a bunch of other things to match!  Sarah loved the gift, and that is what matters.  You can make the fleece blanket in the same way as the initial onesie.  What do you think?  Do you have any showers to attend soon?  Have you ever made a bunting?

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