Two Off-Season Witch Hats, and One Perfectly Seasonal Table Runner

Somehow I do keep finding fancy fabric! I genuinely thought I'd used up all the kid's leftover Trashion/Refashion sewing stash, all those bits and pieces and scraps and the occasional completely untouched piece of thrifted formalware and scrounged luxury material... and then Mr. Craft Knife helped me organize my fabric one cold and slushy January day, and you'll never guess what I found stuffed at the bottom of one very overstuffed crate.

Ah, well. That navy satin formal dress and black lace T-shirt may not have ever made the cut (lol) as runway material, but it made a BEAUTIFUL witch hat!

I'm high-key obsessed with an interesting texture on top of something smooth and shiny, and I LOVE how two disparate pieces can look like they were made for each other:

And yay for Spring Break, when my favorite witch hat model became briefly available to model this latest hat for my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop!

Over the weekend, we swung by my favorite local arts and crafts thrift store because I really needed quilt batting. Alas that I did not find any there, and ended up having to buy some from Satan himself (I miss you, Joann!), buuut I did find two gallon-sized Ziplock bags full of THESE treasures!

I originally bought it just because the light blue colorway is the younger kid's class color at her school, so I'm always needing more baby blue for handmade gifts for her and her buddies, but that long piece is SO big, and so beautifully pieced--look at those perfect open seams!--

--that honestly, I'm probably going to save the smaller blocks for sewing for the kid, and turn that big block into another witch hat. It's just too perfect not to!

But here's what I needed that emergency quilt batting for!

The big kid got me one of those DNA kits for Christmas a couple of years ago, and while it turns out that, unsurprisingly, I am overall entirely from the UK region, there is apparently about 11% of me that's from the Irish part.

How appropriate for the season!

To piece the letter, number, and punctuation blocks, I used Spelling Bee, by Lori Holt, a book that I've actually been dying to use for over a year now, and I was NOT disappointed. The instructions are super easy to follow, and the couple of times I had to seam rip and try again were only because I was paying more attention to hockey on the TV than to what I was doing. I guessed a little about proper sashing width between the individual letters and between the words, but I think they look right:

I've got a couple more projects already cued up after I finish this table runner (fingers crossed it's at least before St. Patrick's Day!), but then I really want to try making a wall hanging featuring my favorite Wilbur Wright quote:

Not within a thousand years would man ever fly!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to random little towns, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!