Holiday Sewing Countdown!

It's Thanksgiving week and the holiday sewing countdown is underway!  Are you ready?

We just returned from our monthly Saturday fabric arts group meeting, Imagine.Create.Enjoy (see our last post for details on the 2011 program) and we re-staged our displays of holiday gift and decorating ideas.  There's lots to see with plenty of holiday fabric, books and patterns on hand to get you started on anything from ornaments to quilts!

At Saturday's meeting, we focused on the designs of Nancy Halvorsen and Art To Heart (http://www.arttoheart.com/).  As you can see from the photo at top right, there are lots of wonderful projects to choose from in Nancy's many books.  We brought out all of the many models we've made from her books over the years and added some new ones.  You can see the three sizes of cookie carriers from this year's book, Tidings, made by Joyce Nichols.  Another of our teachers, Joanne Langan, contributed dove ornaments and showed off her place mat and runner set from an earlier book, Santa's Coming.  We still have the Merry Christmas door banner from Tidings to hang later this week. 

Nancy's newest book is Count On It and it offers a year of stitching fun!  We began - where else? - with January's little quilt. The book gives us letters, numbers and designs that you can arrange to celebrate all the special events and occasions of the coming year.  Isn't our snowman cute? (Reminder:  you need to interface your white snowman fabric before fusing it to a colored background!)

We used Nancy's 2010 holiday fabric line, Tidings, from Benartex (http://www.benartex.com/) for this and the other new projects we showed on Saturday.  As a really special treat, we welcomed Harriet Binder, our Benartex sales representative, as our special guest for the day.  Harriet gave our members a special sneak preview of Nancy's new fabric lines for 2011, including Jingle All The Way, the next holiday line, as well as other lines.  The folks at Benartex graciously sent us goodies to hand out to all members, too.  What fun!

We have a new shipment of this year's Tidings line arriving shortly and it will also be available through out online store (go to our website: http://www.needles-n-pins.com/ and click on "visit our online store").  We'll also have more of this year's Advent Calendars that have been sold out for some time.  It's never too late to choose one of Nancy's projects for the holidays!