2012

This is a tea towel with a 2012 calendar on it:

One of the ships on there - look at the month of April - just so happens to be my Sailor's ship. ;) The other ships are regulars around the NY Harbor. Being the nerd that I am I found the Tugster blog last year, which led me to Bowsprite, who paints gorgeous pictures of the NY Harbor area. In November, Bowsprite designed a 2012 tea towel for a Spoonflower contest & I had to jump on a chance to order it to make up some awesome tea towels for my Sailor's mom, my mom, and myself.

Here's the yard - four tea towels! - from spoonflower:

Well. Guess what, I was a bit rusty on how to get the nice mitered corners and I certainly didn't want to goof these up! Sew Mama Sew came to the rescue with a great illustrated PDF guide on sewing these corners. I followed along -

Put on the 1/4" quilting foot and sew one line around the tea towel, 1/4" in from the edge. Then lift your foot and sew another line, 1/4" inwards from the previous one.

Next, draw a diagonal line across the boxes in the outer corner you've made so that the outside square gets snipped off:

Fold in at the corner of the inner square you marked:

Now fold the edge at the outer stitching line:

And again at the inner stitching line, which will.... MAGIC... give you a mitered corner shape!

Stitch along the folded edge, and all done! Isn't WTGB-109 looking pretty awesome here in April? :)

If you, too, would like a 2012 NY Harbor tea towel, you can order it on Spoonflower on Bowsprite's Spoonflower page. I have my eye on the Semper Paratus fabric, and I think you might be seeing a skirt from it here shortly. ;)

(For the landlubbers, the name of the fabric, Semper Paratus, is the US Coast Guard's motto, it stands for Always Prepared. Every time the sailor laughs at me for lugging around a big purse with band aids, a water bottle, my evdo, a granola bar, extra socks, the kitchen sink, and so forth I tell him "Semper Paratus!")