Teen gifts on a theme

After a little flurry of stitching thanks to #saturdaynightcraftalong with Lucy on IG I can now tick my Christmas pressies makes of the list for this year (well, except for the Family Tree wallhanging, but I'm not promising it for Christmas anyway).

My teenage son has recently had a little re-vamp of his room (which he heartbreakingly advises will be his last re-do before university!!!!) and he's gone for a grey and teal/aqua colour scheme.  It's all very tasteful and if I could ever see the room tidy I might show you a picture, but for now you'll have to imagine it.  He asked if I would make him some bits and pieces to protect his new furniture (mug rug and coaster) and a new cushion cover and bed quilt for the summer months.  He was thinking colours to match the new decor plus an accent or two of orange.  Nice choice, my boy!

Not wanting to refuse an actual request for sewing, I thought I'd make up the smaller items for his Christmas stocking.  So it was out with the hot water bottle to make a new cover (an extra, unexpected make for him).  I found a pair of his old brushed cotton pjs in my stash in just the perfect colours.  Can you see they even have a little orange thread running through them?  

The width of the pj legs just about gave me enough fabric to get the cover out of them and I added a little orange paperclip trim after quoting the panels.  It's soft and snuggly and if I'm honest, a wee bit of a close fit, but hopefully it will do the job.  

Moving on to the requested mug rug and coaster. I really wanted to incorporate something sciencey/mathematical for him.  So a little bit of embroidery for Einstein's theory of special relativity (correct me if I'm wrong) sorted out a coaster for his bedside unit and some technical looking, scientific sort of mathsy fabric suited the mug rug.  For the mug rug I wanted to quilt his initial into the fabric, or rather quilt the background so that the initial in in relief to the quilting.  I've watched Jacqui Guering's Craftsy class on this and she makes it look so easy that I've been dying to give it a go.  Well, it's a great technique, but I am glad I started small and not with a whole quilt!  I found it a bit tricky to get a nice shape to the edges of the letter A and will admit that when I had finished I wasn't entirely happy so I stitched all the way around the letter just to tidy it up.  You aren't supposed to with this technique but DS doesn't know that, does he?

Spurred on by three successful, if rather late night, makes on Saturday I decided to crack the cushion cover on Sunday.  When I made my brother his 40th birthday quilt earlier this year, there were bonus HSTs created from the Layers of Charm pattern.  These worked out brilliantly for the cushion and even had the requisite orange accent.  I used 16 of the bonus HSTs, fiddled with a layout to see what kind of design I could get and stopped at the one above.  Then, though I decided it needed a weeny bit of teal to bring it all in line with the bedroom so I added the little oblique pieces of Lecien, with silver sparkle no less, to create that centre star effect.  Happy, happy!

More Lecien to border the block, some outline quilting which you can see better in the first photo of this post and voila! One cushion cover for the new pre-uni boy's room.  Looks nice, even if I do say so myself.

I made the backing from some charcoal linea sketch and trimmed the covered zip opening (using Just Jude's tutorial) with the rest of the Lecien fq.  Just the business!

It feels good to tick off some boxes and wonderful to make for my boy.  What are you making for Christmas gifts, then?