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Last night I was making a blue block for my Dear Diary quilt. Here is the design I pictured in my head. Actually it was originally more like 12 small squares and one large square, but I got tired of cutting and searching for that many blue fabrics so I changed it to the 4 small squares and 3 large squares shown in this illustration:

I didn’t feel like doing the math or the measurements either, so I simply guesstimated and moved to the machine to sew the pieces together. It quickly became apparent that the block wasn’t going to be big enough and it wasn’t even going to be square! Rather than start all over again I found a rectangle of polka dotted blue in my scrap box which was coincidentally exactly the size I needed and cut the cloud fabric to fit.

Here’s what I ended up with (the actual block):

I like the carefree feel of the finished block, and I love the mystery of piecing scraps together, not knowing exactly how the block will turn out till it reaches the desired size. Bonus: No stress over doing it right. Anything goes here!

Try piecing fabric scraps together sometime when you need to relax. Or sew a handful of pieces together as a warm-up before your regular quilt-making session. At the very least you’ll be warmed-up and ready to go, but you might also end up with a charming quilt top as well.

Not all of us can take off on a week-long quilting retreat, but just about everybody can carve out 10 minutes a day for quilting-related tasks. Here’s how it works:

1. Choose a quilting project to devote 10 minutes a day to. Avoid complicated patterns. You want something simple that you can jump right in and out of without getting mixed up.
2. Set aside 10 minutes each day. Schedule it in. Early in the morning works best for some people, while others prefer evening or late night. Choose a time that works for you. Don’t be afraid to mix it up once in awhile as needed. If you’re ironing the laundry one afternoon, the ironing board is set up and the iron’s hot, take advantage of that. After ironing your clothes, take 10 and press the fabric for your 10-minute project.
3. Divide the steps into short, manageable chunks and assign days to them. For example, Sunday: press the fabric. Monday: cut strips for fabric A. Tuesday: subcut units for fabric A. Wednesday: cut strips for fabric B. Thursday: subcut units for fabric B.  Friday: chain piece unit A-Bs. Saturday: press unit A-Bs. And so on. If you don’t have a dedicated sewing space set up and it takes too much time and effort to clear the dining room table and set up for just 10 minutes, then use your 10-minute days for prep work only. When you do have an afternoon or even an hour or two for quilting, you’ll be ready to jump right in and get stitching!

I’ll be the first to admit that I often hold my breath when I’m machine appliqueing or quilting a tricky section.

Take my bunny’s cottontail at left for example. I thought that breathing might somehow disrupt the smooth curves of the cottontails, so I tried to hold my breath while machine stitching around them. But holding my breath only made me rush around the circles to reach the other side before I passed out.

Turns out that slow, even breathing makes for the smoothest circles of all. Check out that yellow bunny for yourself. It was my first cottontail sewn while breathing. It beat my very best non-breathing cottontail hands down.

Try it yourself and see. About 9-10 steady, even breaths per minute works best for me for both slow and quick machine stitching.

Be patient, it might take a little bit of practice to get it right. In the beginning I sometimes found myself concentrating too hard on breathing and not enough on sewing. Keep it up and you’ll find just the right balance. With good breathing techniques I can now say that making quilts is truly relaxing after a stressful day.

I’ve got cookie cutters in traditional applique shapes like hearts and the Whig Rose, as well as whimsical animal shapes such as elephants and unicorns.

If you want your cookie cutter applique to be a two-part design like my strawberries at left, just trace around each part of the cookie cutter separately and fill in the gap after you remove the cookie cutter. See image above where I first traced the strawberry part only, then drew a line across the top to make a closed shape. Then I repeated the two steps with the leaf part of the strawberry design. Next get your iron out, fuse the two parts to fabric, cut them out, then arrange the pieces as desired and fuse them together.

Some people also like to use cookie cutters as quilting design templates. That would be a fun way to quilt a holiday quilt.

For more cookie cutter quilting fun, see my post, “Two for Valentine’s Day” where I made an edible Valentine’s Day cookie quilt.

As you can see, this very lovely Wildwood for Free Spirit/Westminster print caught my eye not once, but twice. Guess I must really like it!

Keeping a book of fabric swatches in your purse like the 3×5 card notebook pictured here (which I haven’t updated since 2003) can help you keep track of your fabric stash when you’re out shopping.

Just cut a little piece of fabric from the corner and stick it down with a glue stick. You can write any pertinent info next to the swatch such as manufacturer, date of purchase, the store, how much you bought, what you need to go with it, etc. You can also arrange them any way you wish: color, style, designer, project, and so on. This is my 30s repro swatch book.

If you’re a pre-washer, then washing and ironing your new fabric right away is one way to burn it into your memory (just don’t burn the fabric itself). Using the fabric in a quilt is another good way to help your purchases stick in your head. Alternately you could just spend a whole lot of time admiring the new fabric, but unfortunately you’re not going to make very many quilts that way.

My border is a black-on-white polka dot. As I was embroidering I was actually thinking of a multi-color African print for the border, but somehow the polka dots jumped out at me when it came time to add the border. Then I decided to quilt the border with seed beads. … Speaking of seed beads, today’s tip is about choosing batting for beaded quilt wallhangings.

Check out the detail below. There are two different batting effects at play here:

I used black wool felt as the batting for the embroidery panel. Wool felt comes in several thicknesses and many different colors. (Choose a matching felt and if the fibers beard a bit you won’t notice it.) Wool felt is easy to pull the needle through and supports the beadwork very well.

The border was an experiment. It has two layers of Warm & Natural cotton batting. This also supports beadwork well, but gives a different effect. Look carefully and you’ll see that the nylon beading thread carried between the layers creates a bit of puckering like you would get on antique quilts (and new ones as well) when the batting shrinks in the wash. If you’d like the puckered antique look, but don’t want to wash your beadwork (dyed beads can bleed in the wash), this would be the way to go. I haven’t tested this technique with a single layer of cotton batting yet, I needed the heft of two layers to support the wool felt batting in the embroidered block.

The more beads you sew onto your quilt, the more support you’re going to need, so consider all your batting options (including non-traditional ones) before you begin beading. You could even sew a handful of beads on a sample sandwich or two to test the battings out first.

Conventional beader’s wisdom say that you should always match your beading thread to your beads. That’s nice in theory and works well when you’re stitching down a lot of beads that are the same color.

However, if you’re anything like me, you can’t resist those yummy bead soup mixes. How do you match your thread to that? Are you really supposed to buy thread to match all the hues in your bead box? Even worse, imagine switching your needle and thread with each and every bead you stitch down!

Smile, beading is supposed to be a stress-reducer, not a stress-inducer. Here are some easy things you can do to save both your sanity and your wallet:

• Buy your beading thread in a few versatile neutrals such as gray for medium to dark beads and cream for light beads.
• If you’re a hand quilter (or even if you’re not), hand quilting thread is strong and works great for sewing beads onto quilts.



• Try matching (or blending, it doesn’t have to be exact) your thread to the background fabric instead.
• Go wild and use contrasting thread as a design element.

Whatever you do, have fun and just bead it!

More bead embellishment tips here ~ Tip Tuesday: Just Bead It! Sep. 22, 2009

This flannel double four-patch originally had white and yellow tiny squares, but the white and yellow blended into each other way too much for my tastes. Fabric markers to the rescue. Rather than ripping the entire block apart and starting all over again with different fabrics (which would have involved a late night trip to the fabric store … if any were even open) I just colored in the background of the white squares with a green fabric marker. Voila … Instant fabric change!

Y&C Fabricmates are some of my favorite fabric markers. They contain permanent pigment fabric dye and have a great brush tip which gives both a fine tip and thicker tip in the same pen. And no heat-setting required!

You don’t have to color in the entire background to make a change for the better. Try adding polka dots, stripes, funky doodles or coloring in small details of the offending fabric. It works for fabric that hasn’t been pieced together too, in case your local quilt shop has closed for the evening, and you’ve just got to get that quilt top finished.

It’s important to test the markers out on a small scrap of fabric, especially when coloring fabric that’s already been pieced together. These pens are permanent and you will want to see how the markers react with your specific fabric. Flannel takes marker dye differently than regular quilting cottons. Even among quilting cottons, thread count and sheen varies, and those factors influence how the fabric reacts to the markers. Sometimes the color will bleed outward and in that case, you will want to color a bit away from the seam and let the dye flow towards the edge rather than coloring directly on the edge of the seam.

Give it a try sometime. You’ll feel thrifty and clever for making do with the fabric you already have in your stash, and you might even get bitten by a creative bug and discover a whole new obsession in fabric re-design!

Today’s cutting tip has nothing at all to do with cutting fabric, but it will help the edges of your fusible applique stay nice and neat:

Make a small cut into the paper-backed fusible paper before you iron it to your fabric. This will give you a place to grab the the paper and remove it gently without destroying the edges of the applique.

happy quilting! =(^_^)=

Fusible applique is quick and fun. Here are a few cutting tips to make it easier:

• Even if you like a bit of fraying, smooth-cut edges are still important. You don’t want it to look as if your new puppy chewed up your appliques, so make sure you have a good, comfortable, sharp pair of scissors, not too large and not too small. It doesn’t have to be expensive, just sharp.
• Cut slowly and carefully, it’s not a race.

• Cut smart. Notice the differences between the two appliques above. The red swirl is actually only cut once. The green swirl isn’t cut at all! I traced the outer circle and the inner swirl together onto one piece of fusible, ironed the red fabric down, and cut it apart into the two designs. Cut only one swirl, but get two swirl appliques. Then place a simple circle background beneath each one. Clear as mud? Check the pattern below to see what I traced and the photo at left to see what I cut.
• Finally, practice, practice, practice! The more you cut, thebetter you’ll get. Try it out for yourself with my Salt Water Taffy pattern below. It has both shallow and sharp curves to hone your cutting skills.

For a pair of candies as pictured at top right, trace the following onto the paper side of fusible web: one swirly circle, two plain circle outlines (just trace the outer circle for these, ignore the inner swirl), and four of the tulip-shaped wrapper ends.

Fuse the red fabric onto the swirly circle, the green fabric onto the two plain circles, and the white fabric onto the four wrapper ends. Cut out the pieces as shown above, being extra careful when cutting the red swirly circle into the two swirls.

Assemble and fuse the candy pieces together as shown at top right onto a teflon pressing sheet or directly onto your quilt block background squares.

Have fun! =(^_^)=