Christmas Preparations 2023

 

I love Advent time. I love lighting up candles, meeting friends, filling advent calendars with sweets, preparing small gifts for friends and colleagues, and making greeting cards. (Yes, we are old-fashioned and still send handmade cards by post…). I love the house smelling like gingerbread. 

I happened to get some beautiful Christmas and winter panels by Anni Downs, Cori Dantini, and Anita Jeram. All of them are absolutely cute and inviting for adding patchwork, embroidery, quilting an embellishing. There is not surprising that I planned sewing wall hanging advent calendars with them. Nevertheless my planes were revealed far too optimistic and clashing with my work duties, therefore I decided to lay them aside for next year (I should definitely start much earlier than in October) and sew some advent bags only. I used motifs by Anni Downs and Dear Stella, appliquéd on linen. They turned out quite nicely. 

In November I took part in a nice project of Bohemia Patchwork Club. All members were asked to sew five Christmas ornaments in classical Christmas colours. Almost 300 ornaments were then sent to the exhibition ground Brno, where they decorated a Christmas tree with them. It is a kind of invitation to the international quilt exhibition PPM Quilt Show Brno. 

Here is my contribution:

I used the EPP Pattern "Kamener Geflecht" by Regina Grewe.

For our colleagues and friends, I made small cushions filled with wool fleece and spice – cinnamon and cloves. They are great to use as key fobs but they look nice on Christmas trees. They are great to use them as key fobs but they look nicely also on Christmas tree.

Happy advent time!

Michaela 

Advent Calendar Bags 2022

Yes! It´s still very hot summer, nevertheless the fabric shops are filling up with festive fabric collections and the very first preparations for Christmas are beginning. For my part, it means that at least one advent calendar has to be sewn till the end of summer. Some time ago, my good friend Alena asked me to sew advent calendar bags for her grandson, which was actually an honour to me. As I wrote once before, I am quite picky and there are usually only a few fabrics that meet my requirements. This time I chose beautiful motifs by the Czech artist Amélka. 

I made two colour versions to give Alena the possibility to choose: the red version made from Quilters Shadow cotton and a neutral version from a beautiful linen fabric, both coming from the shop of Aja Votrubcova.The pictures and numbers are machine appliquéd.

   

Happy (festive) stitching!

Michaela

This Year´s Advent Calendar

 

It wasn´t a plan, but over the years I found that I´m tempted to sew at least one advent calendar in a year.  I look subconsciously for Christmas fabrics with small motives (for small advent pockets or bags) or for interesting fabric panels which would be suitable as a central motive of a wallhanging.  There is a large selection of Christmas fabrics on the market but I´m picky and I like only a few of them. My eye falls almost always on Anni Downs and Cori Dantini fabrics.

 

This year´s advent calendar is a little bit special, because it is not a calendar for a child. This calendar was sewn for a dear friend of mine, who loves Advent and Christmas. Last year she complained that she prepares advent calendars for her daughters but – being an adult woman - she never gets one herself. I knew immediately who the next advent calendar would be for.   

The basic material is natural linen, the central motive is Cori Dantini´s panel from the Joy& Wonder collection. I write it again and again, but I just have to: Cori Dantini´s fabrics are absolutely amazing. They are not only beautiful in themselves but also very strongly inspiring. Working with them I cannot “only use” them. I´m tempted to develop them, add details, embellish, quilt… 

The central motif is fused appliqué on linen with an added layer of linen on the edges of the picture. The whole piece was laid on the cotton batting, stitched and quilted by machine, I added also a few hand stitches.

I sewed 24 small pockets and my husband added metal eyelets. 

The pockets were arranged and sewn around the central motive,the hemming was made and finally the pieces of string were added. 

 

The piece de resistance are the Tim Holtz number tokens and tokens with quotes. It took a long time before I could finally buy them, but it was worth it, I love them!

Happy Advent time, dear Denisa!

Happy sewing!

Michaela

Another Advent Calendar

 

A week ago I got a phone call from my good friend, a proud mother of a five year old young man. She saw the pictures of the advent bags on Facebook and would like to have some for her son.  It was only a week before the beginning of advent. But I had the time, I was in the right mood (my overlock machine was also still in the good mood by the way), there were still many pictures by Anni Downs and I could find also the needed pieces of red coloured fabric. I could start!

 Unfortunatelly, there were no 24 different pictures, so I had to play a bit with the appliqué.

        I love the mice!

 

Ready to handover

 

Happy stitching!

Michaela