Modern Cottage Creations

It's the busy season at my 'real' job so I haven't spent nearly enough time at my sewing machine this week.  I have a couple customer orders that need my attention too, so that's certainly not good.  I can't wait til I get a day off next week because I feel like I'm going through withdrawals from my sewing machine! I promise I have some great posts planned and coming soon - including a binding tutorial and some great precut fabric ideas.  Until then, I have been thinking about opening up my etsy shop again. Any thoughts on having an etsy shop available?  Have you had good experiences selling/purchasing items on etsy and how would you feel if my handmade pieces were made available through etsy? 

I'm starting to get pretty quick at whipping up these Kindle covers!     This lovely balck and white number was order by one of my friends from work.  I love the fabrics in this one!  Her Kindle Fire HD is going to look great in this!   One new thing I did with this cover is that I changed the orientation of the strap so that it wraps horizontally around the cover instead of vertically.    This simple change allow ths cover to now stand up like an easle if she wants to view TV shows or movies.  An simple, but helpful change.     I guess I'll find out what she thinks tomorrow, but I love it!   -Katie

  I've been working for a while on an applique sample for my quilting class. I'm generally not very fond of applique because I find it so time consuming.  But the project is turning out great now that I had some time to sit down and work on it.    The first thing to do was to finish up each of my applique block.  I used a raw edge applique technique and topstitched the pieced to the background using a blanket stitch.       Once, I got going, it really came together quickly.  (The most time consuming part was of course appliqueing the pieces, so simpling piecing the blocks was so much faster.)     Here's a fun close up of the cute "bundle up" applique!   I used the pattern from American Patchwork and Quilting. Love this magazine!    The pattern was great and easy to follow.  I just made a few changes from their pattern.  Mainly, the snowball cornerstones I made sma...

I will be participating in the 4th annual Fiber Arts Festival at the Chippewa Valley Museum on February 2nd.  I'm excited to have a booth at this event once again.  It is a great way to promote all of the  fiber arts and keep updated with what fiber artists are creating in the Chippewa Valley.  For the festival I wanted to showcase some new work, and not just items that I make for craft sales.  The first piece that I have finished for this show is this Japanese wallhanging. The fabrics are very unique Japanese prints that I didn't want to cut down too much, so I kept the base squares at 15 inches.  Then I appliqued the large circles on top, one per square, but varying the placement for some visual interest.  The fabric was quite difficult to work with because it was very thin and actually had multiple layers too it. The printed part of the fabric could pull away from the base making things tricky, especially during the applique.  ...

I'm not sure why it took me so long to hang this up, but I am certainly happy I got it done. I love the look on the wood pannelled wall with the candle sconces.