Happy Easter!

I hope you have a wonderful blessed day.

Follow me?

There has been some buzz on the internet about Google reader being shut down. I decided to start following and reading my favorite blogs on Bloglovin. It's a fairly simple concept and website but it has worked very well for me. You can follow me on bloglovin by signing up HERE.

Book Signing....Quilter's Cottage

I will be spending a little time at the Quilter's Cottage

in Garden City, SC

 

 

this Saturday March 30th from 10:30 am - 12pm

to sign copies of my book "Large Block Quilts".

 

 

 I will have a few of the quilts with me as well.

I hope to meet you there :)

more this week

Yes there were a few more fabric purchases...

but I needed to get these for my hexagon project modeled after the quilt in

Vignette magazine a couple of years back.

I've been sewing hexies.

A LOT of them actually.

I am up to 76 at this point and one of these days I need to lay them out for a picture.

I am hoping to do it in South Carolina on a sunny morning.

There just hasn't been much sun in Ohio lately

and I don't seem to get the greatest photography unless I have good sunlight.

I need to work on my photography skills.

It's more fun for me to sew though.

Here's another shot of my bundle of fun fabrics from Superbuzzy.

I stuck to text/word prints, cats and french stuff.

All good and intended for different projects.

I am trying to branch away from using matchy matchy fabrics

or white solid background and

trade those for scrappy light background,

and mixing multiple lines intentionally.

I hesitate to call that a scrap quilt when it is planned,

how about you?

Would you call it scrap if it is planned?

This is a quilt from my new Large Block Quilts book called Lantern Lights.

I started it last week using

Boho by Moda Urban Chiks plus a solid Bella called Earth.

I wanted to use the Boho fabric where the original design is a solid

 and the solid where the original design was a print.

I only had a 1/2 yard of the solid.

And it only made 6 blocks....

Now do I call it a baby quilt and be done?

or find more solid Earth fabric online and

mix the blocks so it looks intentional that the solids don't match?

I mean since the solid is a couple of years old,

 I have no idea where I bought it,

the chances of it matching are about zero.

What would you do? It measures about 36" X 54" at this point.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Temecula Quilts Row by Row

A few weeks ago I while visiting Temecula Quilts blog
 I noticed they were starting a mystery row by row quilt.
They gave a sneek peak of a few blocks
and I was instantly intrigued.
I have sewed along with their mysteries in the past
and used my stash or bright prints.
This time I decided to use the same as their quilt,
but to my dismay they were out of kits.
The cool thing is that they wrote that the Fat Quarter Shop had bundles of the fabric that they used.
Judie Rothermel's 25th Anniversary print collection.

So along with my other items from the fat quarter shop,

I bought this bundle plus a 1/2 yard extra for sashing.

It helped that the FQS had a 20% off coupon at the time.

Every Friday for a little over a month Temecula has posted a new block.

Each row has 5 blocks and they finish to 5".

Totally do-able for me.

I don't like to piece triangles due to the points, bias

and fear of clipping the points off.

But I do like to force myself to get out of my comfort zone.

I decided to ease my fear I'd used Marti Michell templates.

I started using Marti's templates on my very first block of the month quilt over 15 years ago.

I still have the set of templates!

It wasn't my first finished quilt though.

 It took me 5 more years to get it quilted and bound

One because it was queen size, I couldn't afford machine quilting,

I didn't have the knowledge or skills to quilt it myself and

because I didn't buy matching border or binding fabric when I started it.

Try matching fabric 5 years later! it's tough.

MM templates are the best I have ever used and

especially for complex small blocks.

So I converted the cutting to accomodate my templates.

It worked like a charm.

These are the blocks by rows.

9-patches variation

square in a square

Ohio Star

Cross

and finally more 9 patches.

I just have to assemble the rows now.

I have a bunch of scraps and partial fat quarters left

and I hope to make another scrappy

civil war repro quilt very soon!

Want to learn more about "Large Block Quilts"?

Hop on over to Martingale's blog and read about it!

 Learn a little more about my process

for the designs in "Large Block Quilts".

Martingale is also giving away a copy of the book!

So if you are feeling lucky...leave a comment on Martingale's blog to win :)

 

One notion I can't live without.

Aurifil thread.

Apparently I use A LOT of Aurifil 50wt.

I'm ready to started my 3rd cone of 3000 yards!

I love Aurifil.

What kind of thread do you use?

I started out with polyester thread years ago and advanced to Mettler for while.

Once I bought my Janome I found that Mettler mucks it up.

I tried Connecting threads brand of thread but it breaks a lot in my machine.

My mother in law swears by Connecting threads for her machine.

I have friends that love Gutermann thread.

It's interesting how finicky our machines can be.

Anyhow, it's Aurifil for me.