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July 15, 2012
Hi again It’s ME. Got away from blogging for a bit, didn’t I? I was surprised to see how long it had been since my last posts, since I didn’t have anything impressive accomplished during my “hiatus”. I have been taking 2 online classes this month–one based on sewing, and one on my other favorite hobby of paper crafting. In a way the 2 classes are related. The sewing class is from Craftsy.com called Stupendous Stitching. The final project will be an “art” piece suitable for framing, based on machine decorative stitches, hand embroidery, and embellishing through couching etc. Right now I am working on what the instructor is calling a “stitch bible”. The idea is to make a sample book (fabric actually) of all the stitches that your machine will do, in the default mode and with changes to the stitch length and width. I have done this for […]
June 25, 2012
Hello all, Mary Ellen here. I dug out an old pattern the other day which I have made many times. It was designed by Karen Montgomery, famous for her runner from striped fabric which uses the 60 degree triangle ruler. The date on this pattern is 1992. On oldie but goodie for sure. It is a “quilt as you go runner” which ends up reversible, with two different triangle/strippy designs on either side. She puts on a regular binding made with a fabric that matches both sides. I want to put a reversible binding on it, made with 2 fabrics so the binding that shows on either side matches the fabrics on that side. I have done this before, using directions from Anita Murphy. I think Anita came up with the “quilt as you go” method WAY before anyone else did. The trouble is that most of her things are […]
June 4, 2012
Hello all, Mary Ellen here. A few years ago in my previous position as guild newsletter editor I shared a tip from John Flynn for calculating the size of a piece of fabric needed for your quilt back. Some of you who have not been at this quilting thing since a coon’s age like the rest of us may not know who John Flynn is. Great big guy from Montana who does wonderful hand quilting, and comes up with quilting gadgets. Here’s a link to his humorous story of how he got started as a quilter. Sometimes when our quilts are too wide for a standard width of 40-42 inches, but not really wide enough to justify buying the 108 inch wide backing or using two full widths of backing fabric, we try to make do with a pieced back. Of course, if you have enough fabric to piece together […]
May 18, 2012
Hello all, ME again. I’ve wanted to try quilting the Baptist fan motif on a quilt of mine. I love this stitch pattern. It’s so old-fashioned looking (that’s a good thing in my book). Originally it was hand quilted with no marking. Amish quilters would just swing the arc of their lower arm and trace a mark with the needle tip. Once they got that line of stitching established they would just echo it several times using the needle length as a guide for spacing the arcs. Sounds easy enough when stitching by hand. However I want to do this by machine. I did quilt this once with my walking foot. I would trace around a template for the first arc and then used my walking foot’s spacer bar “thingie” to evenly space the echoes. What a pain in the patootie that was! Lots of maneuvering of the quilt top […]
May 4, 2012
Hi everyone, I think Fabulous Friday is not bad at all! 🙂 Or at least that could be the first part of it? Anyway…I have couple of surprise-extra hours here at work , can you believe it? (well that’s enough for me to make Friday fabulous, lol!) Its just that normally we have a lab meeting on Fridays from 10 to noon and today’s one got cancelled- me not knowing about that, came to work early to set all the experiments ahead of time…and voila! – some free time! So while checking my email, in the newsletter from Better Homes and Gardens (highly recommend that one!!) I found this – and since we are all in the gardening mode now I had to share: Isn’t this cool?! A nice bench made from just cinder blocks, with so many “extras”! Love the idea of planting some herbs or flowers right in […]