Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Rubies and Pink Tourmaline and Citrine Are a Girl's Favorite Gemstones

I saw this block recently on Instagram and love the colors.  It's making me recall the yellow and pink log cabin pillow I sewed and the quilting to-do pillow in my closet in the same colors.

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Back to Hand Sewing

I attended a Bay Area modern quilt guild meeting this Saturday and brought my Dia de los Muertos embroidery panels to sew along.  My flower bed will be inspiring the color palette of marigold yellow, petunia purple, celosia red, vinca coral and fuchsia.

 I also spied these hexies in the box....methinks they need to be sewn onto a zippered pouch.


Thursday, August 10, 2017

A Quote to Integrate into a Sewing or Quilting Project

“I try to carry books with me wherever I go. Their weight has become like ballast against the churning sea of modern life, where so many real things are vanishing, and so many beautiful things are being made invisible.”

Flowering Meandering Stitch

I filled this quilt sandwich with a free motion stitch called flower meandering and I like it! And so now I want to find some free motion stitch patterns that look like clouds and waves. It's rather helpful that I can quilt on my domestic sewing machine and that this practice lends to using a long arm when I can find a half day to rent one.  These practice quilt sandwiches can also become a dust rag as well as filler for SPCA pet beds.

Happy Lotus Quilt






Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Summer Piecing and Winter Quilting

Hanging in my coat closet are the quilt tops I've sewn, ready for quilting.  But I'm scared.  I'm not very good at coordinating my hand with the speed of my domestic sewing machine, and so my stitches are so not consistent, nor pretty.  Free motion quilting is much harder and physically demanding than the long arm with its steering handles and stitch regulator.  However, I'll never get any better at quilting if I farm it out to a long armer, and renting the long arm is kind of pain in the ass, schedule wise.  And so I played mechanic today and brought out my extension table and changed out the presser foot to a darning foot and just free motion stitched a sandwich with just straight lines.  Ai yi yi.  I had eyelashes or bobbin thread hanging outside the top stitches.  Out came the books.
And the beginning machine quilting book offered sage advice.  After looking at my sewing machine manual, re-threading and re-inserting the bobbin--no more eyelashes once I figured out a sewing speed which of course I couldn't maintain.