Christmas Gift Progress

It's getting so tricky around here to get any peace and privacy to sew "surprises" that I've had to resort to this signage on the sewing room door -

Problem is that the future recipient of the "Secret Quilt" and the future recipient of the "Surprise Quilt" are each in on the other's "surprise" or "secret" respectively and therefore each think that the sign doesn't apply to them but only to the other one!  Still with me?  So "Elfette" had to have strict words and the sewing room was pronounced well and truly out of bounds when the door is closed!  It's exhausting trying to be secretive.

Anyway, thanks goodness for the mum who planned her son's birthday party this afternoon which gave me 4 blissful clear hours to get the Surprise Quilt from a pile of blocks to a pieced top, layered, basted, quilted and binding machine sewn on before being hastily hidden to await some other time to finish hand-sewing the binding.

I'm very happy how this quilt looks but should confess that it wasn't plain sailing this afternoon.  I never knew that quilting on the diagonal was such hard work!  Something about the weight of the quilt seems to change with the diagonal feeding through the machine - I hadn't expected that and struggled quite a bit with the drag it caused.  There was also sadly a moment during the penultimate quilting line when I discovered that there was a hole in one of the blocks! AAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHHH! Gutted does not begin to express how I felt on spotting this mistake! Couldn't I have spotted it earlier when I could have fixed it easily?  I did the best I could with a repair job and am just hoping against hope that it will hold (please, please, please).

On a positive note I think that this is my favourite binding fabric to date and I'm delighted with how it ties the quilt fabrics all together.  Note to self however:  next time I think it would be lovely to make someone a quilt for Christmas think it in July!  Nov and Dec are not good months to be spontaneous about quilt making.  You live and learn!

Hope to have a fully finished quilt to show you in a day or two.

The past few evenings have also been a flurry of activity to try to make decent headway into my Christmas makes list.

First up is the mug rug with little hostess tray which Judith cleverly amalgamated as one of her Christmas Gift Class Projects.  I made this one for my son's male school teacher who I am informed (hopefully reliably) is a huge Dr Who fan.

And then I tried out this lovely little crochet tutorial to cover some jam jars which were destined for recycling but have now met a happier fate  (I warn you making these is addictive!) -

I tried to get a decent photo of these lit up but sadly my photography
skills are much worse than my needlecraft

All in all pleasing progress.