BOM: October: Mittens for a Crisp Fall Day

As mentioned in the beginning of this BOM endeavor, I really was not fond of the 2nd month block, I believe it is supposed to represent a gingerbread house but it just didn't float my boat. Apparently I'm not alone as I found someone else doing the same quilt as I and she put in a Santa face for this same block.






I wanted to do something a little different. I have a fondness for mittens (I always am finding one random "magic glove" somewhere in the house-even in summer!) and so I decided to jump books and go to the "Vintage Christmas" book by Lori Holt of Bee in My Bonnet. Page 61 contains the mitten block and it is so cute!

                     Grab your rotary cutter and mat and let's do this!

First let me just tell you that there is no getting around it, there are a lot of snowballing blocks in this quilt too. ::Sigh::

Don't you just love the snappy little snowman fabric out this year from Moda. I even got a "That is really neat, reminds me of my childhood" comment from my husband. 

 The cut sizes are in her book but as you can see above, it's not too extensive.

We start at the cuff which is simply straight squares and rectangles. I already sewed that in the picture above.










We work our way down to the shoulder of the mitten and here we encounter the first of many "snowballing". Luckily, the pieces are fairly big at this point so not too bad.

Now we have a choice. The pattern calls for four different fabrics for a scrappy heart. I considered just doing a red heart in the middle but decided that may be too plain. I didn't really want to do a scrappy heart only because I would have to dig through my scraps and as I was working on this midnightish-1am'ish, that really didn't appeal at that moment. So I ended up just keeping it as 2 fabrics.





Snowball the top and the bottom blocks to make the heart portion and add the side panels.

Consider fabric placement carefully! I wanted to get the snowman faces
and as you can see it makes the upper right panel look almost square.
I would have been better off if I had put the aqua portion of the fabric there.

The rest is just cropping corners with the snowballing technique for both the bottom and the thumb part of the mitten. Sew everything together and it comes out really cute.

One more block and we can begin putting this together just in time for the holiday season!