Bears and Christmas sewing

I spent some quality time with the bears over the weekend. Not the grizzly kind but I thought it time to try to catch up on the Mod Bear QAL by Sew Fresh Quilts. 
First up - my completed pile of bear paw blocks - 28 of these for the lap quilt size —

You can just see the check-style fabric in the top block; I left this fabric to sew up
last as I wondered if it had too much navy in it....all the rest are blacks.
I made one block and decided it was OK so made another three.

Then it was sashing strips time —

Next was sewing on the sashing and, yaay, lay out time!

I did make one change after sewing on the sashing as it is shown below. I unpicked a little and sewed the horizontal sashing pieces together, then joined the vertically sashed blocks together; more like joining in rows rather than blocks. (Apologies if that makes absolutely no sense; some of you may know what I mean!). I found that I could get a neater join with nesting my seams that way.

Then on to Scary Stuff, mitreing these borders —

I had one un-pick to do where things didn't quite match up but overall not as
painful as I thought it would be.

(Lorna has an excellent tutorial for mitreing borders *here*.)

Press and look at it time —

So far so good, isn't that bear looking great?

And a closer shot —

This looks like a complete flimsy but there is another border to go..it has pieced footprints which are a bit fun. Although it is tempting to stop here I think I'd like to grow it some more :-)

For now though I've tucked my bear away so I could concentrate on some Christmas sewing.

I haven't made one of these braid style runners before but thought one would make a nice gift. I found this good tutorial *here* on the Destashification blog. (This blog had two versions of the tutorial, the extra wordy one with lots of detailed explanations AND a bare facts only version..quite a good idea!) Rather than sew the strips to a foundation piece of fabric as instructed, I made it quilt-as-I-go by sewing the strips to batting and backing fabric. That meant once it was pieced there was no more quilting to do!
(I made mine slightly smaller too, with the starting centre square 6 ½" rather than 7½").

Here I had a whoops- didn't make my backing pieces quite big enough moment- saved by the Iron-on Batting Tape.

An enjoyable project, will definitely like to make another of these one day and play with a bit of colour graduating.

I must get a better photo - none of these show the nice gold sparkliness in some of the fabrics. You'll have to take my word for it!

So that's one tick off my list. I've a few other Christmas projects planned but nothing too major :-) It's nearly December (15 minutes to go just at the moment!) - where does time fly?

See you next time,