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I don't usually take the time to thank every one of you for your kind acts you have taken to make me feel good about myself, but this past few days, I have been giving a lot of thoughts to how lucky I have been to have such great, supportive, warm friends who are always there for me. I have been in need of a lot of support lately, and I have had more than enough of it from my trusted friends and my hubby. Supportive people for me includes every one of you who are nice to hop over here to read my new post out of your busy time. Thank you so much to you all! Sewing something and putting my projects out there for anyone's eyes has not been easy for me. I am very critical of my work and am always afraid that people might be here to judge me. However, in the history of Pink Penguin since April of 2008, I have never ever received a single email from anybody to criticize anything I have made or have said. This I find it almost a miracle as there are people who aren't necessarily a

Here is a little sneak peak of my second and sadly possibly last  Christmas gift from me this year. (Can you still call it a sneak peak  when you show 90% of it? lol)  I totally underestimated how fast time flies.  I was told at the post office that it's too late to send Christmas gifts overseas via standard airmail now. So my gift list went from 20 to 2 since all my recipients-to-be live overseas. So sad, but this is a great lesson - I will start VERY, VERY early next year!  Christmas is not celebrated in the same way in Japan, so there is no gift exchanges between family here usually. (I have never given Christmas gifts to any of my family, nor received one, but we have a perfect relationship :) ) Christmas is rather a romantic day for couples and people enjoy a nicely decorated cake and KFC.  Can you imagine what Joe's reaction was like when  I told him we have to order KFC for Christmas this year? haha He said he would accept the idea if and only if he could have eggnog, wh

Here is a little gift I whipped up for someone, hehe. I know the recipient of this little drawstring bag reads my blog, so I hope I am not ruining a surprise too much  by posting this..! I made this using the same method in this tutorial , but instead of 2 1/2" squares, I used 1 3/4" x 2 3/4" rectangles, which makes a 7 1/2" x 7 1/2" drawstring pouch. I also sewed the patchwork panel onto thin muslin to stabilize it. If you are anything like me, you had a longest list of to-make-for Christmas gifts to begin with, but now you are finally realizing that  1) Christmas is just in 10 days, 2) you don't have time to cross off everything on the list, and 3) you need a Plan B - switching your initial ideas to something a lot  quicker and simpler. At least for me, this happens every year, haha. Here are some tutorials of small things you can whip up little quick and can be great gifts for your friends and family just to name a few: Scrappy organizer by Leila  of Wh

Hi all! So sorry for the longest absence ever on this blog!  I have been sewing a lot recently, but I don't have very many projects I can talk about at this moment! It's the time of the year with a lot of secret projects, right? Anyways, I am so glad to be back today with this block I made last night for Leila for Patchwork 318 bee . Leila chose "Home Sweet Home" as her theme in November. In this bee, we use Kumiko Fujita's Patchwork Pattern 318 book and our own stash  to create blocks. This block is sort of a combination of 4 block patterns in the book - a house pattern and three alphabet (ABC) patterns. I saw Kumiko Fujita's work just like this in a quilt magazine at the library and was so inspired to make one just like hers. Here is how it looks like with seam allowances. I remembered Leila mentioned she finds quilt inspiration in song lyrics here ,  so when I spotted the musical note symbol fabric in my stash,  I knew immediately it must be used for her b