It's a bouquet of sweet projects to make for your valentine. We got amazing milage out of a couple charm packs from Fat Quarter Shop, used some absolutely gorgeous fabrics from Paula Prass' Woodland Delight and Summer Soirée collections, cozied up to Woolies Flannel... so soft; and we even mixed in several fun scrap projects.

I live a ways out of town, so transporting home frozen food before it thaws can be a challenge. Canvas grocery totes are a great alternative to the standard store plastic bags, but they don't help with my frozen food dilemma. This insulated shopping bag with its Velcro closure was the answer. I can load up all the food I need to keep cold (or hot for that matter), seal up the top, and everything stays the right temp for the ride home. As an added bonus, by using the Flora & Fauna fabric, I solve my problem and look cool doing it. Several people at the store asked me where I got my bag. Of course, I told them I made it, and then proceeded to block the dairy aisle while I explained how THEY could go to sew4home.com and learn to make one too!

While at the recent CHA Craft Super Show in Anaheim, I spent a little time walking the exhibit floor looking for cool products our Sew4Home visitors might find interesting and helpful. This is the first of several articles about what I found.

We've featured a number of tutorials that incorporate appliqué or start with unique shapes, like a heart or small circles and squares. Often, the most time consuming part of the whole project is drawing and cutting all those shapes. And they just never seem to turn out as smooth and even as you'd like.

New Product Find: The AccuQuilt GO! Fabric Cutter, which die-cuts layers of beautiful shapes with the turn of a handle.

If you want to jump start a project, start with something off-the-shelf and add your own sewn touches to make it unique. That's what we did with this set of clever dish towels. We started with plain white towels from Crate and Barrel, then added three fabric bands with contrasting topstitching. The color and pattern really pops off the crisp white background. I can't guarantee folks will be fighting to help you dry the dishes, but I can promise the towels will look fabulous hanging on the rack.

You'll see from our instructional photos below that we made this jazzy ironing board cover while working in our booth at January's CHA Craft Super Show. So I don't want to hear any more whining about having no time and no space to sew. This tutorial is proof positive you can have success in the smallest of areas. An ironing board cover might seem like a rather mundane project, but think about it – you look at your ironing board a lot. Wouldn't it be easier on the eyes if it had a cheery cover?

Torrential rains and 35 mph winds greeted us as we arrived in Anaheim, CA on Thursday, January 21st to set up for the CHA Super Show. How rainy was it? They CLOSED Disneyland! It takes a lot to shut down the Mouse. But the dedicated sewers and crafters were undeterred, and they showed up in great numbers to the Anaheim Convention Center on both Friday and Saturday. Jacqueline Smerek (on the right) and I chatted ourselves hoarse over the two-day show, but it was worth it to expose so many new folks to the idea of making their own home décor, and to show them how Sew4Home makes it easy and fun. We took some pictures to prove we actually exist... as do all those great projects you see here every weekday. The fans who stopped by were thrilled to see our projects 'in person.'

Traditionally, I've kept my recycled plastic bags in an old, cracked plastic bucket under my sink. Very stylish, don't you think? It was a mess, and nearly always overflowing. Nature Brights Kitchen to the rescue! I love the Patty Young Flora & Fauna fabric so much, I was searching for all kinds of ways to use it and display it in the kitchen environment. This clever plastic bag keeper/dispenser fit the bill perfectly. I put mine on the pantry door, but it would also work great over a doorknob, inside a cupboard or just hanging from a hook on the wall. Easy to store; easy to retrieve.

Before you close the page without even trying this project, because you just read "boxed corners" in the title and are afraid, I'll let you in on a little secret: there's no gusset involved. That's right, we've created a Sew4Home exclusive design with detailed instructions that make it easy to create a beautiful cushion with fancy accent piping and nice, square corners but without any beads of sweat forming on your brow. Read on 'fraidy-cats ... you'll be sitting pretty before you know it!

We love the cloth napkin here at Sew4Home! It's a green alternative to paper; it's super simple to make; and it adds a cheery splash of color to your table. That's a trifecta of winning reasons to give it a try today. We used a different fabric for each of our six napkin samples, because mixing and matching is fun.

We created this adorable luggage tag out of all recycled materials. A few items we'd been hoarding ... just waiting for the perfect project that would give them a second chance at usefulness. You could follow our re-make and re-use lead, utilize scraps of fabric you have from other projects, or find something new at the fabric store. Then, next time all those black suitcases are spinning around and around and around on the luggage carousel, you'll be able to spot yours in an instant. "That's mine! The one with the cool tag!"

Here's a new take on the standard rectangular placemat. These have a slightly trapezoidal shape (okay ... I just gotta say, Trapezoidal sounds like a character from Fiddler on the Roof ... dontcha think??). The unique shape allows them to fit nicely around our round kitchen table. And, they're reversible, so you can spill breakfast on one side, then flip them over to spill lunch on the other. You could also alternate sides around the table for a fun and colorful look. The coordinating binding ties it all together.