hand quilting – Amherst Quilters Guild

April 17, 2016

use it or lose it part 2

Hello all, Mary Ellen here. In my last post I talked about using or losing your scraps. One of my strategies which kind of combines the two ideas was to clean out my scrap bins to give a bunch away. At our guild’s upcoming quilt show (Apr. 22-24) there will be a scrap pool to play in. (Pay a small fee, get a bag, jam as many scraps of your choice into the bag to take home!) I have some pictures following to show you my “success”. I have been keeping the two bins (one for darks and one for lights) somewhat under control by giving away my smaller scraps to Robi, our guild president, who will work with scraps smaller than I like. But nevertheless the lids and sides of the two bins are usually bulging. So I thought I’d put a big dent in that with a garbage […]

March 3, 2016

a grand old gal

Hello all, Mary Ellen here. This video came on my Facebook feed yesterday. It’s about an 88 year old quilter, still going strong. She lives in Indiana, not too far from where I once lived as a youngster. I hope I’ll be as spry as she is when I reach her age. Does she remind you of anyone in your life? Look at the quilts all over her house. I think I might be approaching her collection’s size, but not there yet! Click here to see the video.

March 16, 2015

3 things we should stop doing

Hello all, Mary Ellen here. Although Angela Walters says these are things that machine quilters should stop doing, I think they apply to all quilters–not just machine quilters. If you always send your tops out to be quilted by someone else, the main ideas in Angela’s piece apply to those who are piecers as well. The rest I’ll leave up to Angela: Click here. (p.s. Blog candy coming soon. I’m almost to a milestone in my blogging at this site. Stay tuned!)

February 27, 2014

checking your work

Hello all, Mary Ellen here. That heading really sounds like a math teacher wrote it. (a retired one!) I’m working on a sample of a block for a demo I’ll be doing in a month or so. The book has great ideas but was not edited carefully at all. I wonder who it was who fell down on the job…the designer, the copy editor, the technical writer… This is very irritating to me every time it happens. And it happens much more often than it should. (In a perfect world it would never happen!) I’m sure many a quilter has come upon errors in a pattern and blamed them on herself. Actually I find that many times the errors belong to some one else. Why don’t they check their work more carefully? That said, our own inaccuracy in a 1/4″ seam cause us problems often. The block I am testing […]

September 27, 2013

What a Beauty!

Hello all, Mary Ellen here. Yesterday I went on a “back stage” tour of the Heritage Village Archives. This is a perk of being a museum member-not a part of the guild membership. I had received the same mailing about it that all members receive and decided I’d love to see what’s up in the museum ” attic” so to speak. There were only two of us in the afternoon group so we got a great opportunity to be up close to the items (this tour focused on quilts and textiles) but since there were only 2 of us Jessica and Kayla showed us just about everything. How cool is that!?! Take advantage of these museum opportunities–there’s another tour tomorrow. Maybe there is still space-you do need to reserve a spot in these tours. Besides the quilts and garments of the same eras, I really enjoyed looking at the garments […]