Christmas was surprisingly simple, and clean up was made all the easier by the fact that my lovely husband installed the dishwasher on Christmas Eve.
I finished my last present at about 8:30 on Christmas Eve, but I wasn't rushed. I would have liked to finish earlier but other things like shopping and preparing took up time I was going to spend sewing.
So here is the Chess Quilt:
The "board" is just a poly/cotton fabric of some sort which we picked for the marble-like pattern. The border (and backing) is a more wooly feel tartan to give it an "old man" feel, which my husband suggested. The quilt was for his brother so I took his advice on that ;).
The chess pieces were going to be screen printed, but with the delay of moving house I didn't get to unpack my silk screen in time or have the space in the garage to set it all up. They ended up being hand rolled using cardboard stencils on the kitchen table. The colour is a little more uneven because of this, but I think it gives it that nice hand-made feel. The dots on the queen were 'stamped' using the head of a nail, and the cross on the king was drawn using the pointed end of the nail. The things you come up with when your craft boxes are in stroage and you can't be bothered spending any time looking for the proper tools!
The pieces can also be turned over to play checkers (or draughts)!
In the end it was something that was really quite simple, yet really effective!
My husbands family do Kris Kringle so we only have to get one present each, and recently they have been having a theme. This year's theme was "more than meets the eye", so the gift had to be multi-purpose, or 'transform' in some way. I think my gift was actually the one which fitted the theme the best, although the quillow I recieved was also appropriate (I'll post about that when I catch up on photos).
My quilt was supposed to have a backgamon board on the back. I'd cut it all out, but then took a realistic view on the available time and decided to make it a one sided quilt. So somewhere in the future I'll be making a backgamon quilt.....
The present my husband made for his other brother was AWESOME and deserves mention here (since this is The House of Wilson blog).
This started out as a common (large) bauble. He found a pattern online to print out and make your own paper globe, so he printed that, and then transfered the continents to the bauble. By 'transfered' I mean that he drew a grid on the bauble to match the grid on the print out, then hand-drew in all the land masses!! I was amazed. The terraforming was then built up using some liqid plastic stuff you can get from Bunnings. The colours were painted with glass paint (also from Bunnings) and then the whole thing was coated with a 'liquid glass' product.
It was originally going to be cut in half to make a trinket box out of it, but after all his hard work he was afraid to cut it, so instead he found a glow-in-the-dark plasticine stuff, and put dots all over the globe to imitate the lights from cities. I'd love to get a photo of it glowing in the dark!!
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