Christmas Hexagons and Jeans Patches ...

The vast majority of my sewing happens on the sewing machine: that way, the work is (relatively) fast, sturdy, efficient.

But the nice thing about projects that are sewn by hand is that they can be done from the comfort of a rocking chair. Very nice. 

Last week, I mentioned a blog called So Happy, with a fun link party called Take Your Time Tuesday ~ especially for sewn-by-hand projects. So I'm linking this post to this week's Take Your Time Tuesday ... 

Here's the latest on my sewing-by-hand: 

In my rocking chair, I've been finishing up the last few hexagons for the Christmas Quilt ... Just those last few at the bottom need to be sewn together and into the quilt ... then the finishing process can begin ...

In other sewing-by-hand news:
My youngest son's jeans have been sprouting holes at alarming rates. Since it's getting too cold to turn them all into cutoff shorts, and since I'd like him to get a little more use out of these jeans, I decided to patch the jeans.

I never patch jeans. But I've seen some really cute tutorials (which I can't find right now, to give them credit ... sorry!) that make the patches look great ... so I thought I'd try.

So, here we have ...
A cute soccer iron-on patch on top of a not-so-cute plain iron-on patch ... Stitched the edges so they won't "peel" off ...

This required a lot of thimble work. Two thimbles. Yeah.

Orange thread, for the jeans that already had orange details ...

I think they turned out pretty cute. The little dude is not sure if he likes the "black" patches, as he calls them, but he's getting over it, and I'm hoping they'll fade a little in the wash. Anyway, navy twill patches were what I had on hand.

About the time I finished those, a couple more pairs of little pants-with-holes came out of the wash, so I did some more patches. Might as well ...

 

By the way, whatever size the patches came in (5x7? 4x6?) turned out to be just right for me to cut a patch in HALF, round the corners, and iron onto the little-guy jeans. 

I used embroidery floss for the stitching, to give the patches some color ... not sure how well that'll hold up, but we'll see.

Speaking of embroidery floss, did I mention that I recently came across a TON of embroidery floss, and that some of it is listed in my eBay auctions (with free shipping!), so if you need any this week, check my listings!