Sew Crafty... Monday?

It was a super-busy weekend, with our church’s missions conference going on, and activities galore which we were involved in. And we’re also trying to get ready to go on vacation, and so there’s the packing, planning, and working at leaving the house fairly tidy and all of the loose ends tied up. So with all that going on, there was no time to blog on Friday. There’s really not time now, but I’m going to be missing 2 Fridays, so thought I would quickly share what I’ve been up to.

First of all, I finally finished the cookbook I’ve been working on for a belated wedding gift. I packed it up and got it to the post office today. Here’s a shot of some of the divider pages and of the open, unfinished cookbook.



Now -- we will be staying with family and friends on our vacation, and so for a hostess gift to take to each of the 2 homes we’ll be staying in, I came up with this idea -- a gift bag containing a crocheted dishcloth, 4 fall-themed coasters, and a box of Canadian Vanilla Maple Tea (which seems not to be available in most of the country, and is sort of a New-Englandy flavor). Here’s one of the dishcloths:


And here is one set of coasters:



The other coasters are not finished yet -- they are all cut out, and it only takes a very few minutes to sew them. Here is what those will look like:


So those are pretty much my crafting efforts for this week. My cross-stitch sampler is almost done, as far as the cross-stitching goes. By the time we get back from our trip, I hope to have accomplished a significant amount of backstitching on the sampler.