Summer Gift Making

My summer crafting tasks included making gifts for two people who did a lot for me in the past year. Having started, finished, and mailed/dropped off the presents, I think I can cross that item off the to-do list. One gift was this challah cover:


When I've never been to someone's house and therefore know little about their decor preferences, I usually work off colors I've seen the person wear. In this case, an orange t-shirt stuck in my mind, hence the heavy use of orange. I used a zig-zag stitch in between each border that makes up the bigger square, which made it a little more interesting than stitch-in-the-ditch quilting would have been.

Moving on to a completely different color palette, the other gift was this wall-hanging (or, table mat). Either way, it's the first time I've pieced something that was neither a quilt nor a challah cover.


Among the other tasks I set for myself this summer was designing projects around several fabrics that have resided in my stash for a while. The blue-ish gray print kept staring at me, asking me to use it, but I had a hard time figuring out what other fabric would work well with it. I like how it works with the intersecting pinwheels in part because I think it conveys a sense of motion in the background. And here's a closer view: