Gifts - Kate Colleran Designs

‘Tis the season for …making gifts!

Do you make some of your holiday gifts? I love to do that, but I always have more to make than time to make them! Every year I say I will start earlier, but I don’t. What can I say? I am a “Last minute Lucy”!

I can’t show you much of what I have done yet for obvious reasons, but I can show you this little gift I made. I get together with a group of quilty ladies every month and we exchanged names for gift giving at the holidays.

A few months ago when I showed the group my Blustery Day quilt, the quilter, whose name I had drawn really liked the fabrics.

Hmmm…. I had a little left! What to do?

I bought this wooden tray at Joann’s Fabrics and decided to decoupage fabric to the tray.

I had not done this before. I am a quilter, but not necessarily very crafty.

First I gathered my tools,

and rummaged thru my strips- I found a few orphan blocks- rejects from the quilt, like the misfit toys!

I decided to put one little rejected block in the center of the tray. Then I surrounded it with strips of fabric. I had triangles all cut, so they were going in the corners.

I started in the corners with the triangles, then created my center row and worked back in.

I learned a couple of things, fabric wet with Mod Podge stretches out of shape. And, a pieced block needs a lot more layers of Mod Podge to smooth out the bumps from the seams.

I found that this little ruler worked great to smooth out the fabric and the awl helped to push the wet fabric into place.