Happy Friday! Today I want to share a recent crafting project that I finished, a small wreath made from dried strawflowers!


One of the hobbies that my grandmother enjoyed was making dried flower arrangement. She bought a lot of the dried flowers that she used (I remember going to a craft fair with her at a school to buy some!), but she liked to grow her own strawflowers. She had a great garden, and the strawflowers fascinated me. Right on the plant, they are dry and crunchy like straw. So different to most flowers!

I started growing strawflowers in my own garden five years ago. I go about this two ways. I nearly always buy a pot or two of short strawflowers from a local nursery to grow on the driveway in a pot. The bulk of what I grow I start from seed. Strawflowers need a long time to get going, so I start my seeds in very early March. They are a time investment for sure!


This has been one of my best years for strawflowers! I have a couple plants that are easily 8 feet, which is so cool. I harvest flowers a couple times a week. It can be a challenge to figure out the right time to cut them, since they continue to open after they are cut. I cut mine while they're still mostly closed. This shoe box sized tub is flowers I harvest just this season!! The seeds I grew this year came from Select Seeds and Johnny's Seeds.

I like to use simple grapevine wreath forms from the craft store. A straw form might be easier now that I think about it, maybe I'll try one of those next! This wreath is around 6".

I like to used hot glue to affix my flowers to my form. I'm using a battery operated hot glue gun (which I LOVE), but it is a little overkill for this project in terms of heat.


I started by adding flowers to the front of the wreath, and then slowly building up the sides.


It's so fun digging through all the flowers and finding just the right size/color for the spot I'm filling. I found these two while making this wreath and they might be my favorites. The colors are just so good!


All done! I don't know how many flowers I ended up using to finish this, but it did take me a few days. I am so happy with how it turned out. I've made a few of these wreaths and I can confidently say this is my best one! I bought some tiny wreath forms a few years ago, I'm excited to cover those too!


Here is a view from the side, it looks like it's encrusted with flowers. :)


Strawflowers are one of my very favorite flowers to grow and they're so fun to craft with. I highly recommend trying them out in your garden next year! Even if it's just a pot from your local nursery!

Happy Crafting!

Vintage Sheet Pillow Cover Projects

Happy Friday! Today I want to share a few recent pillow covers that I made using my vintage sheet stash!


Lately I've had good luck finding nice feather pillow forms at the Goodwill Outlet. Since they can't be washed, I seal them in big black trash bags and let them sit in the summer heat in our garage for a month or so before running them through the "sanitize" setting on our dryer. Once this group were ready to come into the house, I set about making covers for them! I had two 20" forms and one 24".




For the first 20" pillow form, I decided to make a pillow using the Woven Quilt pattern, which can be found in my book, Patchwork Essentials: The Half-Square Triangle. This one is made completely from scraps! Honestly, I'd love to make an entire quilt like this!! I really love how it turned out, so scrappy and happy. I used the wide hem of a sheet for the back, which worked pretty well! It gapes a little bit, could probably have made the two halves overlap more, but that's okay. It still works!




For the 24" pillow form I really wanted to use the pillow cover I made when I released my Giant Vintage Star Quilt Pattern. Unfortunately, at the time I could not find it anywhere (I've since found it, yay!). So I decided to make another one! I had just thrifted the background sheet, which is what I used as the starting point for this pillow. For this one I put in a simple zippered backing.




Last but not least, this pillow cover was a fun experiement. I wanted to make something that used up some more of the wide sheet hems. I put a foundation for the front and then sewed the sheet hems onto it, overlapping them to hide the raw edges. The result is pretty different from what I normally make, but I like it all the same! And I used up a couple hems, so win-win!!


Baby girl is climbing all over everything right now, so it's nice to have a few more pillows to add to the mix. Our couch is constantly surrounded by pillows since her preferred way to get off of it is headfirst! Haha. Also, I just love making pillow covers. They're not too time consuming, you can experiement, and they really liven things up in my opinion! These were a lot of fun to make.

Happy Sewing!

Vintage Quilt Rescue

Happy Tuesday! Today I wanted to share a recent quilt rescue project I undertook!

I've made it a habit to go to the Goodwill Outlet near us in the mornings on the weekend. Digging through the bins of linens and books is a great way for me to check out for 30 minutes or so. It's kind of chaotic, but different from my everyday chaotic, so I can really disconnect for a bit. I've found some incredible things there lately, including a few vintage quilts. I have a really hard time leaving those behind, despite the fact that we have a home full of quilts! Knowing that their next stop is a landfill just hurts.


That's how I ended up bringing home this little quilt! It's a small throw that was in pretty good shape considering. The main issues with it were the binding had mostly disintegrated, and it had almost no quilting holding it together. I knew it wouldn't take much to get this quilt back in working order.


The first thing I did was remove the binding and fix a couple small holes. In hindsight, I probably should have taken the time to replace the batting since it was all balled up in some places. But, we're working with very minimal crafting time over here, so! I knew it needed a decent amount of quilting to make sure it all continued to hold together. I went with a simple diagonal grid. I followed the lines of the patchwork, so the quilting is a bit funky, but that's okay.


Unfortunately, the old binding was not salvageable. Time for new!


All done! It's not a dramatic transformation, but I do think that it's life has been extended.


Other than the fun colors and prints in this quilt, my favorite thing about it is how soft it is. These fabrics have been washed so many times, it's extremely soft.


The back is a plain blue, you can really see the quilting on the back.


I loved the scrappiness of the old binding, but I really didn't have the right solids to recreate it. So I went with this nice woven stripe that's been in my stash forever. I believe it was also thrifted, which is nice!


It felt really good to bring this quilt home and give it a little tender loving care. It is now living a happy life as a car quilt. I keep it in the car to use as a quilt to use in the car, so take out at the park. I hope it has many more years of use in it now!

Happy Quilting!

Rainbow Vintage Sheet Bundles

Happy Wednesday! I've made more vintage sheet bundles! This round of bundles are rainbow bundles, woo hoo! They're available in my shop now: Vintage Sheet Fat Quarter Bundles



Each bundle has eight fat quarters of vintage reclaimed bedsheet fabric. On top of the six rainbow colors there are two multi-colored prints in each bundle.


There are still some soft and subtle bundles left from the last update, and they go so well with the rainbow bundles! A bundle of each is perfect for making a Giant Vintage Star Quilt!


Wouldn't it look so pretty to use all different prints for the background? I want to make one!!

Happy Quilting!

Our Little Free Library

Happy Friday! Today I wanted to share a project that I've become passionate about this past year, our Little Free Library!


After baby girl was born last year, we started walking way more in our neighborhood. Lucky for us, there are a bunch of little free libraries that we can walk to, and stopping at them became something to do on those walks. I usually had a small stash of books in the bottom of the stroller, ready to swap out for something! The libraries brought me so much joy, I realized how much I'd like to have one of our own!


We have a lot of walking traffic in front of our house, so I knew it would be a good spot for one! Unfortunately I was very short on time with a new baby and wasn't sure how I was going to manage to make one. I'm grateful that my Dad stepped in and took this project on for me! We worked together to come up with a design and he built it over the winter.


This Spring I put the finishing touches on it and we installed it. I also took it as an opportunity to expand my garden in this area, which is now the "Library Garden". It's growing in nicely, although there are a few things I need to swap out that aren't super happy.


I love being a little library steward. It's so fun to see people in our neighborhood interact with it. I try to keep the bottom shelf stocked with kids books and activity/coloring books, while the top shelf is for adult books. It's added to by passersby regularly, and I thrift a lot of books for it. The Goodwill Outlet here sells kids books for $.38 and adult books for $.68, so it's inexpensive to keep a stash of books on hand to keep the library full. I love the excuse to save books from the landfill!


Have a Great Weekend!

A Quilty Coloring Book Volume 2

Happy Friday! I made another coloring book!! Say Hello to In Color Order: A Quilty Coloring Book Volume 2. Making the first volume brought me so much joy, I decided to make another. Let me show it to you.


For Volume 2, I dug into my fabric design library. I pulled some of my favorite prints from the five fabric collections I designed from 2012-2015 and turned them into coloring pages! There are also a few pages with designs that never made it into a collection, but I thought would be fun to color.


The covers are a bit different this time, they're printed on plain white cardstock and also feature a design you could color!


There are 16 different designs to color. The books are 5.5”x8.5”, printed on regular copy paper, nothing fancy! I’d recommend using colored pencils or crayons with these, markers may bleed through.


I print and assemble these little books here at a home. I treated myself to a booklet stapler recently, so each book has two staples holding it all together!

Find the coloring book in my shop here: In Color Order Vol 2 - A Quilty Coloring Book

Have a Great Weekend!

Vintage Sheet Side Braid Quilt

Happy Wednesday! I am so excited to share this finished quilt with you today! This is one of my favorites that I've finished in a while!! Say hello to my vintage sheet side braid quilt!


To be honest, I don't actually remember how this quilt idea came about. I knew I wanted to make another quilt with my vintage sheet stash, so I believe I just went through my patterns and picked one that I hadn't made in a while. I still love my Side Braid Quilt Pattern, and I have only made one other full size mini braid quilt! See that version here: Mini Braid Quilt.


I decided to try to cut as much of this quilt from my scrap bin as I could. Super scrappy was the goal, even for the background. I filled in the rainbow of colors with my stash where I needed to.


The layout definitely took some playing with to get right. I swapped out a really bright orange that was sticking out, and a background piece or two that had too much going on. There is minimal contrast in this quilt, so it has a really soft pattern compared to the original mini braid quilt I made.


Here it is in all its glory!! It finished at 60"x78". It's super soft and is like a scrapbook of my sheet stash!


The quilting for this quilt is SO special. This is my first vintage sheet quilt that I've had long arm quilted. I sent it to Katie at Autumn Moon Quilting and she knocked it out of the park. It looks incredible!! I'm so grateful that she was willing to quilt it for me. And I love this fun retro floral quilting design, it goes so well with the vintage sheet prints. It's called Posy Patch.


For the backing I used a sheet (of course!), this one is a fun warm floral. I originally cut and made a striped binding for this quilt, but when it came back I realized it really didn't match the backing at all. So I sent it aside for another quilt and made some with this fun orange geometric. I think it works really well with the front and the back, win-win! I thrifted it in 2011, so it's been waiting for its moment to shine!!


This was a fun quilt to make. It was nice to revisit this pattern, how did it come out 12 years ago!? I think this version is one of my favorite quilts I've made with it. It's great for stash busting fat quarters or scraps!


Pattern: Side Braid Quilt Pattern
Fabric: Reclaimed vintage bed sheets
Quilting: Autumn Moon Quilting

Happy Quilting!