Pot Holders, Coasters and More

 My mom was cleaning up and she found this. This was from when I was in Kindergarten. I smelled pretty bad so I just took a picture of it and tossed it. Did you make one of these in Kindergarten? They got a large piece of butcher paper and made you lie down on it. You got traced, then you had to color yourself in. haha. I don't know if they still do this in Kindergarten.

 These are string pot holders and coasters. I made for my mom's birthday. I actually went overboard on the coasters and made double the amount. It was a good thing too, because I used them in a Christmas grab bag at the 2012 Bernina Club Christmas party. The woman who got it really liked it. She told me that she has to keep track of them so that they don't walk away.

 As in a earlier post here, I wrote about my worms. Well, I have a large black rubbermaid container with my worms in it. It is raised off the floor of the garage and the lid has air holes. One day, there was a small frog in it, like the one we found in the house. As I was moving the paper to feed the worms the frog jumped out at me! After that I decided to get the worms a new home. We went to Koolau Farmers and found this green worm bin. We tried to clean out the black bin, but it so large that we couldn't get all the worms out. Hopefully we can get to it this summer, otherwise I will have two worm bins! I don't know if I can maintain two of them.

Forgotten blocks

I know this post is really late...I'm a bit behind in my blogging. 


Last year I made these 9-patches as part of a sew-along. The sew-along was for a month...and I only made seven blocks, because I got distracted and started making the string blocks pictured below. The string blocks were so much fun!


So while people were making quilts out of all their thirty plus blocks, I had a few nine patches with about a dozen or so string blocks that I didn't quite know what to do with. I set them aside and forgot about them until Thanksgiving or Christmas, when Bonnie Hunter made, RRCB, another mystery quilt. 


As I was looking for fabrics for the mystery, I found these blocks. Well, I set them aside...again, and made some coasters for Christmas gifts.


The coasters pictured below were given to my SIL and brother for Christmas. They were a hit! I didn't know she loved Strawberry Shortcake until I gave these coasters to her. I had the hst on one side with Strawberry Shortcake on the other. I'm so glad she liked them.

Pinwheel coaster and shoes

This was an experiment coaster using the extra half-square triangles from Carolina Christmas that I wrote about here, here, here, here, here, and here. I still have lots more, but I got tired of having to square them. I also had to match the sizes so that they would match.

These are my new Earth shoes. I had to order them through the internet because Birkenstock didn't have them in stock. Luckily, they fit perfectly and they are so comfortable.

Sweet potatoes and patchwork coasters

We harvested more potatoes and gave some to my parents and our neighbor after we steamed them. Yum.

I experimented with making coasters and they turned out pretty good. At first I sewed together 5 strips, but they came out too big so I ended up taking off one row. Then I used denim for the back...I think I'll make some more when I have time. Maybe I'll experiment with a different design.