Cloth: Christmas in July

Before flying off to Kauai, I thought I’d finish a couple sewing projects. I stuffed these toy dogs and stitched them close.                                  

It only took me three years, and I’ve since lost touch with the babies I was going to give them to, but another grandniece was born during the start of the pandemic, and sheesh , she’s already over 16 months old. And so I’ll be mailing my Xmas in July present when I return from my Hawaiian vacation. I also pondered what color pink stripes from my Kona collection to sew into a pillow that will coordinate with a pillow of coral stripes.                                

I think these pinks will work, and I will cut and stitch these  stripes on the Saturday of my return. While hanging up the completed coral striped pillow I just finished, I found this Christmas table runner in progress. I thought I had finished it along with a matching tree skirt. Nope. Its sandwich still had yet to be quilted, which I finished this morning.                                

I love, love, love it, but was stumped on how to attach the 2-inch binding I cut and pressed to its ends which are basically two triangles, making the runner a long hexagonal shape. YouTube to the rescue, and so this is another Christmas project for me to resume before the end of my summer break. Basically the video tutorial calls for lining up the raw egg of the binding against the raw egg of the quilt. But instead of folding a triangle in the binding to sew over the corner of a square or rectangle, you lower the raw edge of the binding a little ways down from the raw edge of the quilt and then snip an 1/8 inch which will be stitched down before lining up the raw edges of both the binding and the quilt before hitting another hexagonal corner. Makes sense to my brain right now, and hopefully I’ll remember and know exactly how to stitch when I pick this project back up. I’d also like to attach a firing of mini Pom poms on this runner like I did on its matching Christmas skirt.