Whew! The ink is drying on my last paper for the semester. The last couple of weeks have been pretty intense but I had a surprise this evening as I was submitting my assignment. The summer session doesn’t start for another 2 weeks! I thought I only had a one week break. I decided to…
learning embroidery
I really don’t know anything about machine embroidery. So far all I’ve done is just stitch a name on some fabric here or there which is just an introduction into the concept. I joined an embroidery group online to see what possibilities are out there, and in the process I found an embroidery mystery quilt….
2 finishes
A friend called yesterday to remind me that I had this morning blocked off to sew, sew, and sew some more. Our church sends teams to Kenya twice a year (each person pays their own way) and they have eyeglass and dentist clinics where local residents can get fitted for glasses and any dental repairs…
Art Imitating Life
I had an idea about a year or so ago. I thought at some point down the road I could buy a digital laser cutting machine to make custom applique quilts. I looked into several and knew which one I wanted, but filed it under “some day”. I was on the company’s refurbished email list…
Easter basket!
I grew up in a family with several children, and one tradition we had was like many people – we hit every available Easter egg hunt in a 20 mile radius of our house. That may be a slight exaggeration. There was the year I won the golden egg; that was thrilling. Then there was…
The Watcher
I’m still whittling down my 2017 UFO’s. I corrected the blocks that had a rotated piece in them yesterday and was so glad there were only a handful. That’s always a challenge trying to fix something once the whole top is finished. In the meantime, I had this kit from Libs Elliott which I bought…
borders and corners
Argh! It always helps me to let a quilt hang for a few days so that I can see if I’ve messed anything up. This quilt is 96×96″ so sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees, so I took a picture of it and it was immediately obvious that the dark red…
a finish and a quilt binder set
Though hers was made from silk and mine is cotton, I liked the way she had hers quilted with just straight lines throughout. I did decide to mix mine up a bit, varying the widths throughout. I also sewed 1/4″ border around each of the blocks, and then filled in the middle with a different…
quilt show lessons
Our guild is having a quilt show in a couple of weeks and they were hoping to get 200 quilts to hang but were short a few from what I heard. There are plenty of people who make quilts specifically for shows – we have an art quilter in our machine quilting bee that I…
sampler quilt finished
And that’s a wrap – other than clipping a few threads. I started this one sometime last year; it’s a sampler based off of several different quilts in Amy Ellis’ “Modern Heritage” book. She had a suggested layout and I followed it for the most part although I added in quite a bit of negative…
win some, lose some
I’m quilting away on the Amy Ellis sampler. No hurry because I really have it planned as a summer quilt to go in the extra bedrooom. I’ve tried out several new techniques related to cropping inside vs. outside, stitching around the cropped areas vs. not. There are a number of mistakes on this quilt but…
O Be Careful, Little Eyes
Do you remember that song from Sunday school that goes like “Oh be careful little eyes what you see, for the Father up above is looking down in love” and so forth? Then it goes on to what the ears hear and what the mouth says, etc. I’ve been busy quilting for our guild’s charity…