While I’ve been catching you up on projects I was working on as far back as November, a variety of things have been afoot at our house.

If I haven’t mentioned it before, the awesome shop (Bobbin’s Nest Studio) where I have been working for the past two years is closing its brick-and-mortar doors and going strictly online. The owner, the employees, and the customers are all really sad that we are closing, but sometimes difficult business decisions have to be made!

I’m going to miss not seeing my wonderful coworkers all the time, but we’ll have to make some efforts to get together with each other periodically. I’ll be continuing to help the owner with the online store, but that won’t even require me to see her in person all that much.

The last day of the brick and mortar store in Santa Clara, CA, will be next Tuesday, Jan. 31. We are clearancing out all the stuff that we aren’t currently carrying in our online store, so if you live in the area, you might make some effort to come by and look for a bargain!

In the meantime, I’ve been trying to clear out my project cue. I had a few requests from my family that I took care of (a seat cushion for my mother, a label for my sister’s quilt, and a pair of fingerless gloves for my sister), which I knocked out fairly quickly.

And I’ve been working on the second quilt from my stash that I wanted to do. Part of my use it or lose it plan. I finished that just the other day and hope to have a tiny bit of sunshine tomorrow so I can get some pictures.

Another part of my use it or lose it New Year’s approach to my stash of stuff was to make curtains for the living room. I have a number of HUGE pieces of fabric from IKEA that I have had for 5 years and need to be put to some use. This piece was big enough and the right colors for curtains for our living room.

The fabric is fairly thin, but there are some of those ugly vertical blinds (provided by the landlord) on the window as well, so now we can open the blinds and get some light in without having people see in. It also helps minimize the early morning glare by filtering the light. My husband and I are both really enjoying them already!

And there is likely to be a big employment shake-up around here, both for me and my husband, both in good ways. Maybe very good ways. So, between being super busy at the store this month and the new job stuff going on, it’s been very busy in a less crafty way. But I’m trying to clear out that backlog of projects in case there is a big shake-up! I’ll definitely keep you posted!

I have a little zipper pouch that I put my hand sewing bits in to carry around with me, and for the longest time I’ve been needing somewhere to put the couple of needles I’m currently using and a few pins. Instead of just cutting a square of felt, I thought I’d make myself the cute little book from Last Minute Patchwork + Quilted Gifts.

But it seemed a shame to make just one, so all my crafty friends now have one as well!

FYI – I used the cheapo polyester craft felt I had lying around, not nice wool felt, which I’m sure would have worked better. But I was eager to just do this with what I had on hand!

We have this awesome purple arm chair in our living room that we bought about five years. Unfortunately, the corduroy upholstery has taken a beating and is nearly worn through in the seat.

Since we aren’t in the mood to have the entire chair recovered at the moment, I decided a simple cushion for the seat would at least keep the stuffing from coming out. I thought of doing something fancy like a zippered cushion, but then decided that I didn’t want any closures that might rub on the upholstery anywhere else. So, I just made a basic envelope-style cushion cover and stuffed a pillow form in it.

Not bad for a quick project. And I was especially happy to find this upholstery fabric at Joann’s with the big gingko leaves on it. It reminds me of the beautiful old gingko tree that we had at our old house in Kentucky. It makes me smile every time I look at this.

I have some other projects that I’ve finished in the last couple of weeks that I’ve been meaning to show you, but I just finished this one and I am so super excited about it that I decided I need to show it to you first!

My husband got a Mac Air recently, and he requested that I make him one of my laptop sleeves for it. When I asked him what kind of fabric he wanted, he said that he would like an “Amy a la Mode original.” And I couldn’t say no to that!

By the way, did you know that the Laptop Sleeve Tutorial is the second most popular page on my blog? (The Super Simple Holiday Card is the most popular page, in case you were wondering.)

And I realized recently that there was a problem with the calculations that was causing the lining to be a little shorter than the exterior. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where it was coming from, but I have edited the instructions to have you subtract 1″ from the exterior length, and that should fix it, no matter what size you are making.

Anyhow, I’ve been on a major kick of using up the fabric I have lying around lately, and I had a TON of 2″ squares leftover from making the first mosaic quilt. I thought these would be perfect for a little laptop case!

In the original tutorial, the quilted side is on the inside, but for this version I have put the pieced & quilted side on the exterior, where it will shine. And since this little laptop is so small and he doesn’t need to get anything else in this sleeve, I didn’t allow for any ease.

It took 140 of the 2″ squares to make this little case for a laptop that is about 7.5″ x 12″. Seems like a lot, doesn’t it?

I finished it off with a couple of vintage buttons. I think my sweet hubby was as excited by the finished product as I was!

I have been seeing old sweaters converted into pillows for years, and I finally had the perfect opportunity to do this!

By the end of last winter, this wool sweater, which I wore around the house all winter long, had giant holes in both elbows. You can actually see one of them there on the right. Giant holes. I decided this was perfect to convert into a pillow, especially with that zipper in the front. I wouldn’t even have to do any kind of closure!

Here’s what I did:

1. Turned sweater inside out. I decided 14″ square would work best, so I used one of those chacoliner things (the ones with the little wheel), to mark off a 14″ square, using the zipper as the center and just above the bottom ribbing for the bottom end.
2. Straight stitched along my marked lines, being SUPER careful when going across the zipper. Well, okay. Not super careful the first time. This has a really heavy duty zipper and I broke the first needle. So super careful after that!
3. Shifted over about 3/8″ from the straight seems and zig-zagged along all four sides.
4. Trimmed off all the excess and across the corners. Turned right side out.

You do need to remember to get the zipper pull in the right place so you don’t sew it out of the pillow all together. That would stink. I actually did not do that, amazingly.

It turned out that it looked better with a 16″ square pillow in it (I think these pictures are maybe with the 14″). It looks fuller and more stuffed with the 16″.

Voila! Fuzzy sweater pillow.

If it only matched anything in my house. It may end up being gifted somewhere if I need another gift, but I really wanted to make use of this sweater this way, and now I have!

And I swear this took maybe 30 minutes max, including changing out my broken needle. It was an awesome easy evening project!