What Are Quilters Blogging About Today?

Get ready for a fun fortnight of ideas and projects to jump start your holiday sewing for your own pleasure and for gifts. I have a new table topper design that we will start today, and sew over several days. Then I have more projects to make for gifts or for yourself. It will be two weeks of fun, and it starts today! This is a Mystery Quilt Along! But don’t worry, we’ll reveal the design this week. So, put on a Christmas movie, watch the Hallmark channel or Great American Family channel for round the clock Christmas ...

I got my quilt bound and finally finished. I love this picture with the flag, but you really can’t see much of the quilt this way. How about this… I know it just looks like 16 patch blocks and star blocks. That’s what it is…but, if you look closely, you can see that the center …

Quilt Finish: 16 Patch Stars Read More »

Somehow it seems like the more time I have, the less I get done. That has been the story this week, as I have piddled around for most of the week. I didn’t get back to Fleur Lumineuse, and it really should have been almost done by now! But, no. I saw one squirrel after another, leading me to spend hours looking at my collection of Christmas books.

I have 45 Christmas with Southern Living and Christmas with Victoria Magazine books. These really do need to be culled and most sent on to the library’s book sale shop ...

Our oldest granddaughter and her husband are expecting their second child, and the nursery theme is an old-fashioned blue-and-white gingham with teddy bears and warm wood tones. When I think of classic baby quilts, the Double Irish Chain is always … Continue reading →

In the sewing room, I had to set aside Fleur Lumineuse for a bit, as I was asked to present a ruler demo at our meeting last Thursday. I started by pulling a bunch of bee theme fabrics and cutting strips.

Lay out the strips in various ways to decide on a sequence that looks best.

I sewed the strip sets into two identical sets, then placed the ruler for cutting. I cut the first two pieces at home so I didn’t have to take a rotary cutter and mat to the meeting. Plus I had to do the ...

I recently finished two patriotic quilts that I’m excited to share as I say, “Happy Birthday, America!”

This first one is called Positive Vibes and is a remake of a pattern I first had published in a magazine nearly 10 years ago. That was before I became a fabric designer and I always knew I wanted to remake using red, white and blue scraps of my own fabrics.

I quilted it with Red, Aqua, Navy and Gold Metallic threads. In each of the aqua, red and navy rows of plus blocks, I quilted straight lines to represent stars. In ...

Working on the background of the art piece with a French theme this past week has been a bit challenging. I had set out a number of requirements for myself that made it more difficult. I didn’t want the background piecing to be all uniform sizes of squares. I wanted to spread out the print with the pink to a pleasing distribution over the entire base. I wanted the base to be large enough that the applique would only cover about a third of the space. And the big one, I didn’t want any seam to reach from ...

This week was so hot that I wished for a Scottish summer, although it was hot there too. I was glad of the neck fan and bedroom fan that I had bought. One night it was 28 degrees and even my stone cottage was hot upstairs. There is no air-con at work and we were sent home at 4pm where all I did was water my garden, marvel at how fast runner beans got and try to beat the slugs to the odd strawberry.

Goosey Quilters, based in Tavistock, is celebrating its 40th anniversary so some of their members came ...

If you read Monday’s blog post, you know that a sweet blog reader sent me a quilt top that only needed to be bound. I’ve been on a roll, trying to finish as many things as I can. This quilt went straight to the sewing room, and I bound it on Monday afternoon. Here it …

Quilt Finish: Community Quilt Read More »

Lorelai’s First-Time Quilter’s HandbookFrom Basics to Beautiful QuiltsA Complete Guide to Quilt Making232 pagesLandauer Publishing (a division of Fox Chapel – $24.99Lorelai KueckerPigs in a Blanket Quilting Lorelai’s work has come up in my big picture book app more than once. Smitten with her quilted garment construction, it’s hard not to be smitten with her… Continue reading The Book Report

We have some bolts of fabric left to clear out of inventory so let’s see what’s left and I also need help choosing a craft item to make for this weekend’s craft swap. I’m thinking I may do a small zupper pouch or some rope bowls. Chat with us live and tell me what you think I should make.

All fabric on sale is on clearance while supplies last! If you have some projects coming up tune in today and see if any of these prints will help!

Join us for a laid back chat about ...

Earlier this spring I dug into my flannel bin, determined to clean it out and get the 15-30 year old fabric into quilts. I posted about the project HERE.This is the first of those quilts...Leap FrogThe tan, speckled fabric isn't flannel, it's cotton, but it was perfect so I just threw it in.Such a simple design - no pattern - I just tried to make the best use out of what I had. It finishes at 56"

The new motor for the longarm arrived and My Sweet Babboo installed it, along with a new belt just for good measure. I was nervous to use it, as we had no guarantee that this would solve the problem of blowing fuses. It was the most likely culprit as we had eliminated just about everything else. To have the machine just shut off and stop while moving it risks a tear in the quilt. So, I needed to assure myself that it was probably fixed. I removed the bobbin case and the needle, set the machine for stitch length and ...

Here we are at the cusp of summer and progress is being made. 

Either last Wednesday or Thursday I picked four cucumbers; Hubs found another lurker. We picked the first one a few days earlier, immediately ate it, and declared it to be the best cucumber we ...

I have this collection of fabrics with a French theme that are begging to be made into something. My thought is to make them into a pieced background, and then add a collage applique. I haven’t yet decided how to cut them up, what size to make the squares, or rectangles, or maybe use a variety of sizes and shapes to make it more interesting.

With all the pink in one of the prints, it seemed logical to select pinks as the collage color for the applique. In watching some videos on how to do this, I learned that ...

 This quilt has been on my list since I first saw it in this bookAnd I thought it would be fitting to make it in patriotic colors as America celebrates 250 years so I pulled out this bin. There are a lot of cutting instructions and I'm starting with scraps and small pieces of well seasoned yardage so this is going to be a labor of loveI'm also going to leave the stars 1/2 blue,

No change in the numbers.

The runner I call Harlequin is now basted.

The blocks came from a class I took in 2017 on improvisational curved piecing.  This is the third quilt from the blocks made in that class.

A lot of the fabrics are my hand dyes.  I didn’t have enough of the blue or green for the border.  I got lucky and found the blue solid at my Guild’s fabric sale.

I could do simple quilting and finish it quickly, but decided to play around with the quilting on this one.  Except for the black and ...

This week at work was all demos, teaching and customer quilting as well as cracking out the machine inventory, preparing the classroom and all of my usual dashing about. Every evening I did some extra hours for my Friday job because they were short staffed. I was glad when the weekend rolled around and I did not have to set an alarm.

Consequently, last week’s laundry still has not been folded, my “sewing room / office” is in a muddle and I have been eating the same thing every day to save time. 

The Slug Pub was not a success ...

Quilting the Quilt of Valor went off the rails this week. When we left off, I had the quilt loaded on the longarm. The backing is a blue background print with a patriotic theme provided by the QOV chapter, along with the batting of 100% polyester. The batting is not my favorite, but it was provided by the chapter. It does have the advantage of not shrinking when washed.

The next task was to audition and choose thread color. I decided on white Glide for the upper thread and white Bottom Line for the bobbin.

The pantograph I chose this ...