One Small Finish and Three Teeny, Tiny Finishes

Very late last night, I finished hand sewing the binding to the back of my Christmas Mouse wall hanging.

Earlier in the evening, getting the binding sewn on so that I didn’t cut off the points of the diamonds was an interesting challenge.

When I was sewing the half square triangles (hst) together, I used Pat Sloan’s How to Keep Your Points tutorial and was so pleased with how most of my points turned out.

But adding the binding to the front, completely covers the points making it impossible to see them.  So what I did was baste the binding on using 1/8″ seam and then I flipped the wall hanging over and stitched the 1/4″ seam on the back using the quilting lines as a guide.

I only had a few points that got cut off… but I know that the more I do this, the better I’ll get at it.

The Christmas Mouse was a free pattern from Joy Patch back in 2009.  I still have two more from that set that I want to embroider and turn into wall hangings.

Unfortunately the pattern for the Dec 25th Christmas Mouse no longer seems to be available but Dec 24th can still be downloaded for free here.  Dec 26th is here.

For the frame around the wall hanging, I used fabric leftover from making Judith’s stocking for the 2013 Santa Sack swap and some left from making my Holiday Celebrations quilt.   The binding fabric was a recent purchase because after three more small projects (that I’ll be posting about soon), I didn’t have enough of the first two fabrics left to make binding.   The background fabric is my favorite Kona Snow.

Each of those little hsts finishes at just 1 1/4″ square.  The completed wall hanging is 13″X13″.

When the sun finally shone late this afternoon (after a week of gloomy, cloudy, yukky, cold, blahhh weather), my trusty quilt holder-upper and I rushed out to the backyard to get a couple more shots to share.

Can you tell I’m really pleased with how this turned out.  🙂

It’s also great to be able to check something off my 2015 Finish Along Q2 Goals list so quickly.

Yesterday and today, I also had three tiny knitting finishes.   In Wednesday’s WIP post, I showed you the start of some tiny Christmas socks.

I was converting a pattern I’d been given by Stephanie to knit them in the round, but when I got to the last few rows, I thought I was doing something wrong because the toe of the stocking was coming out way too short.  So I did a bit of googling about turning the heel of a sock and made some adjustments and ended up with this little sock.

But I wasn’t ready to give up on the original pattern.  Stephanie had told me that her mother made lots and lots of these, so I knew it must be something I was doing wrong.

I decided to knit one in the flat and I was still stumped, until the light bulb went on… what I thought was the flap to make the heel of the sock was actually the top of the sock.  Finally it made sense!

Once I realized how the pattern worked, I was able to finish converting it to knitting in the round.

Now I can use up the rest of the yarn I have leftover from making the mini mittens, hats and scarves when I was testing my pattern for Elven Winter Wear.

But that can wait until tomorrow.  Right now it’s time to pop some popcorn and get back to reading Neil Gaiman’s Stardust (<-affiliate link).

Wishing you all a great weekend filled with Aloha!

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