Valentine Surprises -- No Quilting Today

The hugs did good....and he created a monster. Yep, that's a Pandora bracelet and charm. Actually, it's a pretty smart move on his part. Birthday....charm.  Mothers Day...charm. Christmas...charm. He's set for years. Who knows, he may have bought enough charms to get him through a few years and hidden them in his sock drawer (I should look).

He also brought home a bunch of flowers, which are currently looking happy in the nice, clean kitchen.

Normally, after dinner, I come up to the studio and hang out. Tonight, I hung out with the hubs catching up on DVRd Revenge episodes. When I did come up I found this on my sewing table.

Aww. He took this cute little pottery frog vase we got at a craft show in Florida last month and did a little arrangement and left it in front of the sewing machine, where I couldn't miss it. Too sweet.

Guess my festive nail polish job from yesterday put him in a romantic gifty mood. 

No time to sew, and anyway, I'm still blocked on the Bloomin' Challenge piece and think it wouldn't be a great idea to start on something else as I may never get back to the Challenge (no wonder they call this a challenge). I've set a goal to come up with a concept and to complete it on Monday (work holiday--woo hoo).

So on this wintry February night I'll leave you with what's 'bloomin' ' in my studio (sheesh! you'd think I wouldn't have a problem with a 'Bloomin' Challenge').

Poinsettia won as an office door prize back in mid-December. Two months and it's still full of blooms. There's something to be said about poinsettias from a garden center greenhouse.

More garden center plants. The cyclamen have been in bloom since I bought them the first week of December. The Christmas cactus was a purchase last year, and it did bloom this year...for Christmas (seriously!)

I added a couple stems from the flowers downstairs. I love this vase and am looking forward to using it with flowers from the garden this summer. It's just a flat pottery disc that has a hole that's the diameter of a half dollar, and in that is a small frog (pins) in which to stand the stems. It probably holds a quarter cup of water. Very Zen.

Tomorrow night we'll do something quilty. It's hard to not be creative with all these cheerful blooms watching.

Happy Wednesday! 



No-Sew Valentine's Heart Garland -- Tutorial

Gather your materials (see materials list in previous post)

Determine what size heart you would like to use and cut template from a folded sheet of paper.







For this tutorial I used 9 hearts...3 each of 3 different fabrics. Cut 3 fabric squares slightly larger than your template from each of your fabrics. Also cut 9 squares from the fusible bond material slightly smaller than the fabric squares.





Iron the 'sticky' side of the bonding material to the wrong side of the fabric. Follow manufacturer's diretions on the packaging for ironing.






Fold fabric with right side out, place folded pattern on fold and cut out hearts. Do not discard scraps.







Cut a smaller heart template to fit inside the large heart.








Cut a smaller heart from each of the fused scrap squares left over from cutting the large hearts.







Peel backing from hearts.








Lay out hearts across width of fusible material leaving minimum of one half inch above and below and one inch in between and from sides. Cut enough strips of fusible web to cover number of hearts you cut.





Use the fusible web as a template to cut your backing fabric.








Iron fusible material to wrong side of fabric backing.








Peel away paper.









Iron fabric to batting. Be careful to keep your iron on fabric as the batting will tend to stick to your iron.

Trim off excess batting.








With batting side up, lay cut hearts across batting leaving at least one half inch around and one inch between hearts.







Fuse hearts to batting.









Cut out hearts, leaving one quarter inch or more of batting showing around edges.








The batting edge will only appear on the font side of your heart, so don't think you've cut something wrong when you flip it over and see solid fabric.






Fuse small hearts to fronts of larger hearts.









Using a strand of crochet thread (or ribbon) threaded through a doll needle, thread through a button, tie a knot and make a knotted bow. Take your threaded needle through the front of the tip of the heart and tie a double knot at the back to secure. Add buttons or beads to each heart, or every other heart, as you like.




To attach the hearts poke needle through front of first heart, tie a double knot to secure, bring needle up through back of second heart, leaving at least one inch of thread and knot. Continue ntil you have all your hearts strung with all knots on the fronts. Snip threads to uniform length. I used 3 colors of crochet thread together to do this.




On the end hearts, knot a 12" length of thread through the front of the heart and tie off end in a loop to hang.

There you have it, your very own No-Sew Valentine's Heart Garland. Find somewhere to hang it and stand back and admire your job well done.