Beginning the new year with some little projects

Now that my niece's quilt is finished and on the way to her, I'm starting out the new year with some little projects.  I made two sets of these little pennants using Christmas fabric for my two dear friends here who are sisters.  They have little loops on each end so they can be hung on the tree.  I made a set for our tree, too.

I decided to make a set for Safety Pin Studio using some of the safety pin fabric in my stash.  I made them just like the large pennants but rather than using bias tape to string them, I just zigzag the raw top edges to the ribbon.

Speaking of stash, I've been hoarding all of these gorgeous William Morris reproduction fabrics for years and I finally decided to use one of them to make a cloth shopping bag for Anna.  Here's hoping your new year is happy, healthy, and productive.

Cloth shopping bags for gifts

For the last three years, we've celebrated New Year's Day with our friends the Penland sisters, their husbands, and the Mother Penland. We've known the Penlands since before we were married and they are all very dear to us. This year I decided to make some cloth shopping bags for the ladies as gifts.

I reverse engineered a folding bag that one of the major chain stores sells and patterned it on that because I like the fact that it folds up and fits in my purse. The one I made for myself is about six months old and I use it all the time.

Here's one of the finished bags and the other two folded up.

These are the tags I made for them. I've been wanting to use the little rubber stamp of the fox with the typewriter, so I downloaded some fonts that look like typewriting and printed the words on sticker paper. The manila tags come from one of the office supply stores.