Mindy Carlson

Happy Holidays! Ours were busy, busy, busy. I hosted my husband’s side of the family at our house for the first time ever. I made about two hundred cookies and introduced a new stuffing recipe that had been declared part of the Christmas/other holiday menu now.

The Nintendo Wii has entered our household. Mark and E are playing it together. E has my “ever forward, never back/full speed ahead” mentality which is a little hard on Mark and his “take your time and go back as many times as necessary”. H is having a good time watching them play and is trying to do all the same movements as his older brother.

In the meantime, I have a commission I’m working on and I got to work on a small project for myself.

The commission is a family tree quilt. It’s very detailed and will take a lot of applique time. Here are pictures of the fabrics involved.

My other project for the weekend was making a plastic bag dispenser.  We have loads of plastic bags that we keep corralled in the linen closet.  They are  unsightly and take up a lot of space.  It’s something that I’ve been meaning to make for quite awhile, but other commissions and projects and children have taken up my time lately.  This little project took me, cumulatively, 2 hours. In reality I was working on it all day in 5 minute bits.  I used a charm pack of 5″ squares and the instructions from the Moda Bakeshop website. http://www.modabakeshop.com/2009/06/grocery-bag-despenser-tutorial.html

The charm pack had enough squares to make two of these little bag dispensers. It’s big enough to hold all the plastic bags that were lurking.  I’m working on a second one today and I’m going to do a little applique lettering on it for fun and practice. Something original like letters spelling out “Bags” in two places. I know, I’m just a crazy woman.

It felt good to just do a little, easy project that I could finish in 1 day.  I’ve been doing all these multi-week and other long-term projects and having a little project gave me the “instant gratification” that I’ve been missing lately.

Plus I didn’t have to run out and buy any fabric or batting or thread.  I just pieced together the batting size I needed from the scraps I had around.  This project was a great scrap and leftover fabric eater because you end up needing an 18×18 quilted square for the outside and a 20×20 square of batting and backing fabric for the inside.   And color doesn’t matter.

I think this year I’ll try to do a bunch of little projects as well as a few big quilts.  I got a huge amount of satisfaction and it will help me use up a bunch of my scrap stash I have in a few drawers, a tub, a couple of bags, and on my fabric shelf.   Keep tuning in here to see what I experiment with!

Happy 2011 to all!