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I am posting my Free Motion Quilting Challenge early this month as I will be attending both Pacific International Quilt Festival and Houston International Quilt Festival as well as teaching twice locally-tough life! I am afraid to put it off this month. Our tutorial was presented by Teri Lucas-I love her work! I’ve been following her blog for awhile and I love how she is able to morph her motifs into each other for a beautiful, cohesive look. And that was our challenge this month: to combine motifs in pleasing ways. Teri suggested we start out by quilting our name…
In a perfect world I would make pretty labels for my quilts-and that would be the same world where all stitches are even and all projects finished. The reality is, I am usually preparing my labels shortly, very shortly, before my quilt goes to a show. I recently needed 4 labels asap. I could have done what I usually do-hand letter my label onto muslin. But that is so tacky and my handwriting so poor-I had to change my game. Out of this evolved my “git-er-done” method of printing quilt labels. It really is 10-minutes, not counting the time you spend…
I have the happy problem of having 4 items juried into Pacific International Quilt Festival. The “problem” part comes in because that involves some mundane tasks: sleeving, blocking, labeling, shipping and making sure there are no Basset hairs, stray threads or popped seams. So I thought I’d show how I block my quilts. I always, always block anything larger than say 24″ square, because the intense stitching that I do tends to make them a bit wonky. It’s not that hard to block a quilt. I do start out with a “foot wash” in a deep bathtub with cool water and…
September’s Free Motion Quilting Challenge over at SewCalGal’s site was provided by Paula Reid. Paula came to my local guild several years back and made a lasting impression on me. Gotta love the hair for one thing! The girl knows how to quilt and has so many practical ideas on how to make quilting easier-I’ve followed her since. September’s Challenge was to quilt this stencil motif of a Feathered Wreath. I despise marking, have I mentioned that before?! I decided to up the challenge by using metallic thread. I have learned, the hard way of course, that you HAVE to use…
I recently found this silk pillow gem at Home Goods for a steal. I loved the artful print-it looks like it may even be a printed photo of an art piece-I’m not sure. The colors are fabulous and the pillow is very well made. But once I got it home, the colors were way too bold for my Living Room-bummer. I had been playing around with some Radiance and my new Sharpies collection, and that made me wonder-could the Sharpies somehow be involved in resurrecting the pillow? The colors originally looked like this-loved it! By the way, I am not a pro…
I love living in Northern California, but sometimes the weather really tests me. Even though we have already experienced 15 consecutive days of daytime temps over 90 degrees, it’s officially fall. And this week shows five more consecutive days in the 90’s. At least some of my plantings know better, especially my grasses, succulents, cacti and drought tolerants.Of course “Autumn Sedum” knows it’s fall! I have no idea what is the name of this guy, I call him “Elephant Trunk”. Love how he goes to seed.All my grasses are going to seed too. I love my grasses-beautiful in the morning, backlit…
What a week-I actually completed 2 t-shirts in just a few days! One was a “remodel” of an existing t-shirt and the other I started from scratch. Considering that I have Fear Of Knits, that is quite an accomplishment. My church is going to have an area-wide service day where we all go out to various projects in the community and work at whatever needs to be done. We are going to wear t-shirts to identify ourselves. I decided I am just too cool to wear a plain unisex t-shirt, so I made mine over using the “T-Shirt Makeover” by Pamela’s Patterns.…
This is another case of “I make all the mistakes so you don’t have to”! I learned so many things the hard way on my Lily quilt. I’ll be passing along my mistakes and remedies. First, marking. You know I don’t like to mark and I only mark when I have to. I put grids all over this quilt, so that required marking. I marked 3/8″ grids on the Radiance fabric in the center and 1/2″ grids on the border of raw silk-all of this on wool batting. So we have challenges from the get go: I was marking on…
I thought I was done with “Mom’s Lily Bed”, formerly known as “Lily Quilt“. Just for grins, I thought I might add beads to the outer border, since I already had put them in one of the inner borders. I’ve been following Kathy Schmidt’s blog and she does some really nice beading on her art quilts. I guess her beading got stuck in my head and I thought what the heck, let’s see if this does anything for this quilt. So here we are without beads. Pretty. I’m a little leary of the whole embellishing thing because IMHO the quilting world…