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I have to say, one of the best parts of my so-called job is when people send me pictures of their quilts. Last week, blog reader Chris sent me this lovely picture of her completed Tweets quilt, which she calls "Bird Flirt". I did actually swoon. It is so lovely. More amazingly, this is her FIRST appliqué project. AND, she quilted it herself using the quilt as you go method. IT. IS. AMAZING!!!!!
Well done Chris.
I watched this video last week in total wonder. I sincerely urge all of you to take 12 minutes to watch it too. It might just change everything…for the better…AMEN.
Happy Valentines Day
Sue, who wrote
"My favorites are the shortbread cookies. I liked them better when they had sugar on top, though. They're all great."
Now I am hungry and looking for some girl scouts to buys cookies from!
Hello from cold snowy Colorado. Here is a shot of my design wall/table this morning. I’m madly working on a Mimi’s Bloomers block for you. I’m hoping to have that up on Friday!!!
Head on over to Judy's blog for more inspiration.
I will be back later today with the ruler winner.
Yeah…I thought that basket needed a little something too. So I added some flowers and leaves. Ahhh much better. And guess what? Those are the flowers and leaves from Block 1 of Mimi’s Bloomers. If you missed it you can find them here.
If you want to make this block here are the instructions etc:
Also, since I am so in love with that ruler from yesterday I thought I would give one away. To enter just leave a comment telling us FAVORITE Girl Scout cookie. If you don’t have Girl Scout cookies in your part of the world then just let us know your favorite cookie. See ya Monday!
Thank you all for the lovely get well wishes! We are all feeling much better here now. So now it’s time to sew…yippee!
Some of you might remember that lovely blue and yellow fabric I showed here last week. Well I’m practicing some piecing and EQ7 skills by designing a sampler quilt. My first block is a little basket I designed. Today I am showing you a couple of the steps and tomorrow I will have downloadable instructions for the whole block.
This block need 6 half square triangles so I thought I would show you my favorite method for making these. First I cut 2 squares of fabric and place them right sides together. I ALWAYS cut my squares slightly larger so I can trim them down with my favorite ruler.
Then I mark a diagonal line on the wrong side of the lighter fabric.
Then I sew a ¼” seam on both sides of the drawn line and cut apart on the drawn line.
Here I use my FAVORITE ruler the Quilt-in-a-Day Triangle Square Up ruler to cut these to the right size and trim the corners.
For the basket handle background I cut a 13 ½” square in half along the diagonal. Then I stitch ¼” from the drawn line and cut apart on the drawn line.
To make the handle I cut a 2” x 18” of fabric along the bias and use my bias bars to make a nice ½” tube. Then I trace the handle pattern onto the background and glue baste in place. Now it’s all ready to appliqué down.
Be sure to check back tomorrow for the rest of the block instructions and a give-away!
So, remember how it is when you’ve been sick and you start to feel better and you get so excited that you feel better that you think you are actually Wonder Woman?
BUT…you’re NOT…well that’s me. I felt so much better yesterday that I did a whole lot of stuff. How do I feel today…well not so good…live and learn…AGAIN!
I do have exactly enough strength to pass on some really great information about sources for small spools of Aurifil thread. Thanks to all you lovely readers who sent these in. I have more coming so keep checking back too:
All That Thread has yummy collections of small spools that you can find here:
http://www.allthatthread.com/index.htm
Cotton Club has a thread club with sme really great collections here:
Pacific Rim Quilt Company has loads of colors at:
http://prqc.com/thread_applique.htm#20-spool-set
Pumpkin Vine Corner has really good prices and a nice selection here:
http://www.pumpkinvinecorner.com/Aurifil50wtmini.htm
Little Quilts has wonderful 3 packs here:
If any of you have other sources just e-mail them to me and I will share them with everyone!
So, my week last week was very interesting to say the least. Remember how I said I had tons of paperwork…well that was all true. I had to do my taxes by Wednesday for kid financial aid reasons (all parents of college age kids I can hear you groaning right now) After I got that all done I thought I was home free. Ha! That night one of my smoke detectors started intermittently chirping. Since it would only chirp 3 times it was really hard to figure out which one it was, so I did what most logical adults would do at 3 in the morning and unplugged all of them (don’t worry everyone turns out fine). Well it kept going so I did the next most logical thing an adult would do at 3 am and hid them in my sock drawer. By now the dog had bolted out into the yard and was refusing to come in. Finally everything stopped…kinda.
The next morning I had to drive out to pick up my latest batch of freelance work and when I got home the dog was hiding under the desk, trembling. Then the mystery chirp started again. After a mad search I figured out it was my Carbon Monoxide detector so I called the Fire Dept. They made me call 911 and within minutes I had 3 firemen and a police officer in my front hall. I told them that the reading was .97 so they checked the house. Just as I said this I realized that I plug these in upside down since they stay in better that way so what I was really reading was Lb….as in Low Battery. So now I felt really really STUPID. Luckily for me I live in a small town and everyone is nice. They still checked the house and everything was fine.
Now I thought I was home free and I would be able to sleep that night….Ha!
I went to bed nice and early and was sleeping really well when I was woken up by a kid yelling “Mom. I barfed”. I will leave the rest of the story to your imagination. Just keep in mind that this was a contagious kind of barf and you will have a pretty good idea what the next 72 hours were like.
Oh…I forgot to mention that all this was happening while we were having a BLIZZARD !
Guess that design wall will have to wait until next week...good news is that it should have new Mimi's Blocks on it!
Hello everyone! Greeting from snowy Colorado. We are having a heck of a blizzard right now. Anyway, I have uploaded the Tweets patterns into my shop and I just wanted to let you guys know.
Stay warm everyone.
(For all you EQ pro’s out there I apologize for being so behind the times here)
So, I’ve been messing around with my new EQ7 and I have discovered this really great feature… you can actually go to fabric websites and import images of their fabric and use them in EQ7. The picture shown above is just a preliminary version of a pieced sampler I’m designing. I’m using the Moda fabric line Summer Breeze II from Sentimental Studios. I just went over to Moda and downloaded the fabric pictures. From there I could put them in the quilt and see how they looked before I even took a stitch. Amazing!!!!
