Trying to stay cozy

I have noticed that I enjoy working with the color red this time of year.  It gives me the illusion of heat, especially when one gets up to a temperature in the single digits outside.  Fortunately, we haven't run out of wood YET, so the wood stove is working double time keeping us warm  I have also noticed that I have been particularly fond of  the combination of red with black and yellow lately.  This is no doubt why I pulled out this cozy cat fabric out of my stash to work with this week.  I had made an apron out of it a couple of years years ago but had enough left to make another tricolored apron, almost.  There was only enough of the red fabric I was going to use for the flip side  to make that side...no scrapes to work into the tri-colored side but I did find this other red fabric that also matched the cozy cat fabric that even had some black and gold in it so it was a no brainer to use it on the tri-colored side.  

One of the best parts of making a new apron is the left over scrapes.  I usually try to fashion a matching hot pad or two out of them.  It gets my creative juices going figuring out the best way to highlight the fabrics in an 8" block.  A few months ago pinned this very attractive block out on Pinterest and have been waiting to find just the right fabrics to use.  YES, these were the perfect fabrics for this block.  It also looked like I had enough of the various fabrics to make two of them.  It was going to be a bit challenging using these fabric since 2 of them are directional.  I was careful to lay out the blocks before I actually started sewing it.  I even got a third hot pad out of the scrapes left over from the first 2 hot pads which  I am calling a bonus hot pad.  It is simply the 5" square I had left of the cozy cat fabric with a narrow black inner border and the red fabric from the flip side of the apron as the outer border.  Since the cozy cat fabric is interesting all on it's own, it even worked well in a simpler block   The fact that I used up every last bit of that cozy cat fabric put a smile on my face!!!!