Sunday, March 11, 2012

MORE...



My friend Jann has made several beautiful Square Dance quilts. Jann is an accomplished weaver, beader and quilter. She has a wonderful mastery of color. She uses primarily batiks and hand dyed fabrics in her quilts. I am so happy that she uses lots of my hand dyed fabrics because I love seeing how she brings them to life in her quilts. And best of all, I get to machine quilt her pieces so I get to enjoy having the quilts in my studio for awhile.
Click here to see more http://jannblock.wordpress.com/category/quilting/

Friday, March 9, 2012

FAST FUN EASY QUILT

 Last November, at The Gathering  http://www.aquiltersgathering.com/
in Nashua, NH  we saw this pattern over & over. Several vendors featured it using different pattern names, tools & techniques.

My friend, Sandy has been intrigued with this design for quite awhile, so we had a mini retreat & we each made a wallhanging.

We used the basic techniques from the book Square Dance by Martha Thompson and then tweaked them a little.

I started by sewing 49  6.5" blocks together ( 7 blocks across x 7 rows ) Add a border all around - I used 6" wide, to be safe, but actually trimmed off quite a bit.


I made my own template using a 4.5" ruler. Measure 3/4" from each corner of the ruler
and connect the dots with lines drawn with a marker. *Use some clear tape on your ruler & draw on that if you don't want to permanently mark your ruler.

Next, position the  template (ruler) with the lines matching the seams on the blocks; as shown below.


*TIP - I found that my small rotary cutter was the easiest to maneuver when cutting around the template AND I put some sticky-back sandpaper dots on the back of my ruler because the ruler tends to want to pivot and skitter around in the middle where all the seams are joined and raised up a bit.

As you cut your new "pinwheely" blocks line them up on a design wall AS YOU GO ALONG -so you don't end up with a big jigsaw puzzle of mismatched blocks. 

Now, just sew your blocks back together.
Use care in sewing and pressing your new blocks as they are now cut on the bias. I really didn't encounter any problems with the bias issue at all.
You will have some waste blocks to use in some other project or use in your border - These are on the bias so use care sewing them.


Add a border or two.
Machine quilt.
And......
TA DAAAAAA !!!!!!
Here is Sandy's top. She used a package of 10" squares. It is gorgeous.
This fabric just sparkles. I love it !



Thursday, March 1, 2012

SPRING IS ON THE WAY

Well we finally have some snow-just in time to usher in the first day of March.



A good time to hunker down and do some projects

I just mailed this out to my sister for her birthday
hope she doesn't see my post today.

I've been stamping up a storm



These are a few of my handmade stamps




Notice that I'm taking close up photos - I don't want you to see the total mess that I create when I'm working.
This is a more realistic view here. I haven't eaten a meal on a real table in years - Isn't that why they invented TV tray tables anyway?


I'm always in awe of those perfect studios in magazines. How does anyone get anything done in those studios ?  I mean REALLY!!!! The only place that I ever saw a studio that I could relate to was Robbi Joy Ecklow's in STUDIOS magazine (Spring 2010) in an article called "Disorganized Organization"