Finished and Gifted

My lack of posts have not been due to lack of sewing activity, but the opposite; I've been sewing heaps, and am also hopeless at taking photos of stuff and photoless posts are boring!

Last night I stayed up late to finish off the second advent calendar as today is my brother's birthday and that was his birthday gift. Here are the two finished advent calendars:

They are practically identical except the order of the pockets is mirrored vertically and horizontally and they have different coloured bindings. I wanted to get them both finished so that my bro could choose which one he wanted; he chose the red one.

Finishing the second one seemed to turn into so much trouble! I had bought a second spool of thread for the quilting but it's gone missing, so I quilted until I ran out on the weekend and then had to take an unplanned dash to Tessuti on Monday. I spent some of Monday evening and then Tuesday evening sweltering over my sewing machine (we're having a mini-heatwave here in Melbourne; not that hot really but we're not used to it this early in the summer!) only to look up one square from the end to see that I was almost out of thread again!! I carefully manoeuvred my quilting so that I finished around the edge first so that when I ran out I could still finish off the binding and do the last bit of quilting after getting more thread (poor practice I know, but desperate times!). Luckily I had just enough thread, and I mean just, here's how much I had left when I finished: