Free Applique Pattern series: Fluttering, Block II

Fluttering Series continues with Block II.  Just click on the picture to be lead to the PDF file available free. Use these original blocks for applique or embroidery.  

Have fun and enjoy!!

Marjory

Scrappy Mug Rug Swap Christmas 2011

This month the mug rug group tried a new kind of swap.  We knew who our swap partners were and we exchanged one on one.  So my partner was Karen@Laughter in Quilts.  She many does piecing and I mainly do applique.  That makes for a great swap, we each received something we love but rarely do. Here is the mug rug  package I received from Karen:

Wasn't I lucky?  Two mug rugs, a pouch and chocolate.  Boy what a great Christmas swap!!!!!  This snowman was her first try at designing her own paper piecing pattern.  Isn't he great!! Then the snowflake, wow oh wow!!!  Love it all.

Here's the mug rug I designed, made and set to Karen:

Since Santa is one of my favorites and Karen told me she loved him too, I took a pattern I already had designed and modified it to fit a standard mug rug.  She loves it!  Which is all I could ask for.  But this isn't all I sent.  Here's the rest:

Another Santa mug rug using Christmas fabrics, a pincushion made to look like a peppermint candy.  I need to make one of those for myself.  Maybe I'll add it to my Pincushion tutorials.  How about that?

Merry Christmas!!!
Marjory

Green Tamale Day

My great friends, the Rudolfo's, are of Mexican heritage and every year they get together as a family and make red tamales. I am always included in this process. We make them a week or two from Christmas and then they are served on Christmas. This is an all day process but lots of fun. We did these last week and I forgot my camera.

Then they informed me that they were going to do green chili tamales. We did this today and I was smart enough to bring my camera. This was the first time for most of us to make green tamales so we imported more family members that were more knowledgeable. Actually it was much easier then the red tamales. Red tamales include meat, either pork, beef or both which is usually cooked the day before. Both are made using masa but is prepared differently. Red has the red chili sauce added to the masa and the green have creamed corn added. Actually the green are vegetarian and delicious. To keep this post from being over burdened with photos I made a mosaic of 16 of the photos I took that tells the whole story.

This mosaic takes you from preparing the masa to cooking and aftermath of eating tamales.  After making tamales it is traditional to cook a batch and have a feast.  Which was carried out on each of the tamale days.  Now on Christmas we will have both green and red tamales.  

What a great feast!!

Marjory

Little Quilt Swap

Sorry for the delay in posting.  This time it was computer failure.  Ughhh!  I hate this.  My computer just wouldn't turn on.  Everyone said it was the little motor.  But it's a Dell and only they will fix it.  So I had to dig up $300 to buy a new one.  I still have to retrieve data from the old one.  I'm working on that.

Last month I joined in on a new kind of swap.  It's called "Little Quilt, Sew, Vote and Ship".  It's very different.  We send pictures of our quilts to the leader and she posts them.  That way no one knows whose is whose.  After the picture deadline we vote on the one we like the best. Actually we had to rate them 1-20.  The way it works is that the one with the highest score gets their first pick, then the second place gets their first pick unless already picked.  So one down the list.  Then after all the votes are in we are notified who to send our quilts to, but we still don't know how we rated or whose quilt we get.  It was very exciting and I enjoyed it tremendously.  Here is my entry:

It is a pattern I put out about 15 years ago that was designed by myself and my mother, June P. Brennan.  Here is the quilt we designed together as a composite in EQ7:

Mom designed the flower and I designed the quilt.  It is wall hanging size, about 54" square.  I don't have a picture of the final quilt because I never quilted it.  I have to get busy and hand quilt it.

I was almost late with my photo for the swap because of my computer failure so I just posted the quilt without the binding.  Shh, don't tell anyone.  It was fully quilted just not bound.  Then I cropped the picture so you couldn't tell.    When the voting was done I was told to ship to Sewgentle in PA.  We had 7 days to post them.  I still had to do the binding so it took 2 more days to pick a binding and get the work done.

I then mailed my quilt of on like a Thursday.  On Friday I received a package from Sewgentle.  This confused me.  Why would the one receiving my quilt send me a package.  Then I realized that I had won her quilt!!!  I still didn't know which one it was so I quickly opened it.  It was one of my top choices:

Isn't it cute!!!!   I love Santa's!!  Actually I have a collection of them that I put of every year.  It turns out she choice mine as her number 1 choice.  How nice is that!!!  She ended up rated 5 and I was 9.  I'm really happy with what I received and she is too!!!!  Both happy swappers here!!!

For the love of swapping!!!
Marjory