Halloween Sewing

I'm still trying to get back to blogging regularly, as you can tell - in addition to being busy with the baby (and summer fun stuff until recently), I really have continued to struggle with what I should post about - I have such a backlog of fun things to share, I can't decide which to post so I just don't get around to posting! This is totally silly, I realize, but I do really want to share it all with you, so I'm going to just try to be better about jumping in and sharing something already. In this case, though, it was an easy choice since these photos have been sitting on my computer since last October and I wanted to be sure to share before halloween!

One of the wonderful things about owning a house and being somewhere we intend to stay a long time is that we have finally started acquiring grown-up furniture.  After years of having a tiny ikea dining room table that barely fit 4 placemats, we now have a lovely vintage dining room table with plenty of space for a table runner!  I have visions of making a whole slew of runners for our table but so far this halloween one that I whipped up last year is the only one that has come to fruition.

I had bought up this awesome Lizzy House halloween fabric last year and I was determined to actually use it rather than having it sit in my stash.  I thought these fun square in square blocks would be a great way to show it off (I am sure there is a real name for these blocks that I don't know - anyone?).  I just pieced them by measuring and cutting the squares and triangles but I realized after the fact that they would have been much faster and easier if I had foundation paper pieced them.

I backed and machine bound the runner with a solid grey kona fabric, with the goal of having the runner be reversible.  This is probably why I haven't motivated to sew any more runners since last year, the grey side of this has been a great all purpose, all season runner for our table that matches most of our placemats!  Making your runner reversible is a great way to get more bang for your buck (so to say), especially if you're making something like this where one side is really only useful for a few weeks a year.  I actually often lose track of the fact that this is actually our halloween runner and get a surprise when I take it off the table to wash it!  Which reminds me, it's been October for a week, I really need to go flip it over while it's still halloween season.

In the top photo above, you can also catch a peek of this fun spiderweb mug rug that I whipped up last year.  It's a bit of a play on the traditional spiderweb block, but done in a more improv style.  This was also a fun chance to play around with my low volume grey fabrics!  Maybe this year (or realistically at this point, next year) I'll make a couple other cute mug rugs/trivets that are also halloween themed to make a set.

How about you, have you been doing any halloween sewing?