What Are Quilters Blogging About Today?

Do you have exotic plants in your garden? 

In my street a lot of neighbors have lovely Japanse maple trees and bushes in their gardens. The maples really stand out beautifully against the white painted modern houses. There are even a few neighbors who have a type of bamboo that doesn’t spread. 

Today, September 18th, bamboo is celebrated on a global level to spread awareness on its conservation. Let’s enjoy this gorgeous plant in our weird and wonderful quilting corner of the internet too.

This Bamboo pattern is pretty easy to stitch out. The bamboo design can be ...

Hot tip: read all the way to the end!

How do you like your chocolate? As a chocolate bar that you can share (or not), as a hot cocoa with whipped creme on top or a as brownie that you can nibble on?

My personal favorite ways to eat chocolate is as sprinkles on icecream, as a chocolate bar with nuts, or like my fellow Dutchies as hagelslag on a peanut butter sandwich.

This week’s free motion quilting design is called Chocolate, as you have guessed already. This pattern is a grid-based design. I stitched it out on a ...

This September you can create your own quilting retreat at home, for FREE!

Two exciting online quilting events are taking place back to back. You can spend a whole week creating projects and then learning how to quilt them. Doesn’t that sound wonderful?

Yes, yes, yes, the classes in these events are all FREE! You will have free access for a certain time period, and you could even buy the classes if you want to keep them for longer.

I was asked to create free motion quilting classes for both these events and I have been sitting on this ...

Have you ever heard of a Kelp forest? It is the name of an underwater area that is densely populated by kelp. It covers most of our oceans’ coastlines. Mysterious, beautiful and also very important for the Earth’s ecosystem.

And kelp makes a great inspiration for Free Motion Quilting designs. Flowy and bendy so you can cover an entire area, soft and curvy for fabulous texture, and just two different design elements to worry about.

Start with a curvy (gentle serpentine) vertical line. That line curves back down with a series of feather / teardrop shapes. The next piece of ...

It started as a block. A LARGE block–25″. It was beautiful, and someone worked very hard on it. And abandoned it. And it was lonely.

What to do…

Well, I also “happened” to have (if you believe in coincidence) these leftovers someone shared with me. The colors worked. The strips weren’t very big and about 3/4″ across, finished. I cut them into 2″ wide sections and pieced those together.

Also, found this lovely yellow in my stash with just the right print on it. I love being lucky, don’t you?!

Around and around until there were ...

Halloween Season has started here on my blog!

And with this season’s opening and the first day of school for me, it also the start of a new series of Free Motion Quilting patterns. I loved creating new and original designs and I can’t wait to share them with you.

Today August 30th, is Frankenstein Day where we celebrate the author Mary Shelley’s birthday.
Have you ever read her book Frankenstein? In my day job as a high school art teacher I have done lessons on the book and the films but I have never applied Frankenstein ...

Sometimes we just go mad with quilting.

There is the inspiration, which leads to an idea, which leads to all current projects being pushed to the side and…

Ta-dah! A quilt.

The beauty of it (in this case) is that, not including the sashing and borders, all pieces for the blocks start as a single size square. And it doesn’t matter what size that square is (as long as they are all the same size).

So, you might want to dash about your sewing room and gather up those stashed squares that you have been wanting to make something ...

 Time to share the last steps -- adding borders and some quilting ideas!  

I added three borders to my finished top -- first border is the background fabric and cut 2" wide to finish at 1 1/2".    Second border used up all my leftovers from the layer cake (plus a couple add-ins because it was pretty tight) -- it's cut 3" wide to finish at 2 1/2".  The third border is the background fabric and cut 4" wide to finish at 3 1/2" wide.

The layer cake leftovers could be pieced together with straight seams but for the fun ...

Carole, of From My Carolina Home, has shared a local guild project: Cradle Quilts. You can LEARN MORE about it here.

As soon as I saw her post, I thought about some particular stacks of possibilities in the sewing room. Ah, yes, finally I have the right idea.

I may have gone a little berserk, but I was having a really good time. Really, you can put together an 18″ quilt in nearly no time at all. It is a great way to use up various leftover bits.

NOTE: I do not have process pictures for all, but am happy ...

This quilt was inspired by a yard or so of fabric found at the thrift store.

Unusual for a baby quilt, perhaps, but it seemed perfect. I am certain someone will love it.

I’ll get a full tutorial later, but know that the blocks are made from 4-1/2″ squares. The points of the stars are 3″ squares using the stitch, trim and flip method. If none of that makes sense, feel free to ask questions or, as I said, a tutorial is coming.

I am certain this quilt, which will be donated, will find just the right home ...

I am sure I saw a similar idea somewhere online, but this is my version. It uses the NO POINT STARS made famous by cluck-cluck-sew, resized to make a perfect 36″ baby quilt.

It went together quickly, and I enjoyed it so much I am making some variations and size suggestions into a tutorial. If you have charm packs or a layer cake laying around, it might be just the idea.

It's finally arrived - the last day of this year's 12 Days of Christmas in July blog hop!  I hope, like me, you've been wonderfully inspired with great ideas.  Maybe, like me, you've also had a chance to walk down memory lane in your Pinterest or blog feed! I will confess - I even found pictures of an annual quilt I made for Lilli that I had completely forgotten about!  

Today we have a chance to hop over to Karrin's blog, Karrin's Crazy World, as she shares some of the gifts she has been ...

It is called Halfway because it started with a pizza box full of half-square triangles.

HALFWAY QUILT BLOCK

The secret is that there is only ONE set of cutting directions, but you can lay it out FOUR different ways. Of course, you can just do it one way for the entire quilt. There is nothing wrong with that. If you use more variations you will get more movement in the final quilt.

Here you can see the difference between FOUR variations on the left and TWO layouts on the right. It is up to you! Just get to work on ...

Welcome to the 11th day of the Twelve Days of Christmas in July Blog Hop!   I really fell down a rabbit hole while writing this post - I couldn't for the life of me remember what the eleventh day gift was, so I went to look it up.  (Just FYI, it's eleven pipers piping!)  But I also found out that if you received all the gifts listed in the song (and they accumulate - each day repeats all the gifts to date) you'll have 364 separate items by the end of the 12th day!  And since 1984 ...

It's Day Ten of the Twelve Days of Christmas in July Blog Hop, and today we get to visit with Carole of From My Carolina Home again!  This will be the second part of her project, and I for one am looking forward to seeing the finale!  I've also got the next steps in our quilt-along - assembly of the wall hanging, or the next block for our quilt people.  Hop on over to Carole's and see what's going on there, then come back for those next steps!

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How quickly time flies when you're having fun - and just imagine how quickly the days until Christmas are going to fly by!  But I hope that you're getting some inspiration, and maybe even a head start on your Christmas crafting!  Today I'm going to share a recipe with you before we move on to the last two blocks for the center of the Christmas quilt.  Let's go!

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Many of you already know how proud I am of this girl (my eldest granddaughter, Lilli) since you've seen her grow up from her earliest appearance ...

The rectangle squared pattern is versatile. Great for focus fabrics or large-ish prints.

I had a stack of miscellaneous scraps. Just added some matching colors and a black for the sashing (to look a little like streets).

The piecing was good enough to take geometric quilting, which I usually avoid. But this time it felt right and adds to the traffic/construction feeling.

It finishes at 45″ square. I used leftovers to create the back. And into the donation pile it goes. YAY!

Welcome to Day Eight of this year's 12 Days of Christmas in July blog hop!  Today I have a fun craft to share with you that may help alleviate some "stash" at your home, as it has at mine, plus give you a way to spend some fun time with the kiddos in your life.  We'll also be working on two more blocks for the Christmas tree center of this year's quilt.  Let's go!

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Every so often, you should take the time to look back through your old Pinterest pins.  Rather like scrolling through ...

Here we are, on the downslope of this year's 12 Days of Christmas in July blog hop!  Hopefully we can enjoy the downhill rush to the finish, pausing along the way to find more Christmas inspiration.  Today I've taken a little trip down memory lane to share a family tradition with you, and we'll also receive the instructions for two more blocks for the quilt or wall hanging. Let's get started!

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As many of you may already know, we have a tradition in my family that started many years ago, when Lilli, my eldest ...