adventures of a quilting diva

With the holidays as well as the flu season fast approaching, the Red Cross needs a steady supply of blood donations to meet the increased need. You probably know that blood donors get free juice and cookies, and that just one donation can save up to three lives, but you most likely did not know that you also get a free supply of great quilting thimbles.

Now I have tried many different kinds of thimbles in my quilting career: closed, open, metal, leather, … and the list goes on. But for me, none can beat a piece of the simple bandage that they wrap around your arm after you donate blood. Cut a piece several inches long, enough to wrap around your finger or thumb a few times and voila, you’ve got yourself a thimble that is thin enough to feel the needle but just thick enough that you don’t get pricked. It fits perfectly, the price is right, it’s a great way to recycle, and it comes in fun colors too!

When the needle starts to poke through, discard the bandage thimble and cut a new piece. Depending on how hard and often you hand quilt, by the time you run out of bandage thimbles, it might be time to donate blood again. You can donate once every 56 days, that’s 8 weeks. Or if you run out earlier than that, you can buy a roll at the drug store.

Every two seconds someone in the United States needs blood. (American Red Cross) A gift of blood is a gift of life, so why not consider making a blood donation this holiday season? Wear your bandage with pride, then give your brand-new quilting thimbles a try and get started on a hand-quilted gift. Two gifts from the heart in one!

Visit Give Life: American Red Cross for more information about donating blood or to find a blood drive near you.

It’s fun and easy to make leaf patterns for applique. Just gather a collection of interesting leaves. They don’t even have to be in autumn colors, just find some shapes that you like. When you’re choosing fabric for your leaves, they can be any colors you want.

Lay the leaves down on a computer scanner or photocopy machine and print them out. If they’re not the right size you can enlarge or reduce them. This is a scan of some gingko leaves I collected.

If you’re in a hurry you can use the printout just as it is. Otherwise trace the outlines of the leaves onto a new piece of paper and use that as your pattern. Tape the printout to a sunny window and place a blank sheet of paper on top and it will be easy to see.

You can trace all the details of the leaves just as they are or you can simplify the outlines as I did with my gingko leaf patterns below.

Here’s a fun free project I designed using my gingko leaf patterns, Autumn Gingko Leaves Purse Jewelry. You can download the PDF at CottonSpice.net, September 2007 issue, page 40.

Sometimes the hardest thing about free-motion quilting is simply getting started.

This week I’m quilting my Candy Hearts Baskets from February 2008. After quilting in the ditch over the seam lines with invisible thread I free-motioned the borders before tackling the appliqued blocks. Heart vines seemed appropriate for this heart-themed quilt so that’s what I went with, plus a twisting ribbon in the narrow vertical yellow border as well as to fill the extra space in the wider horizontal yellow border. I enhanced the quilted lines at right to give you a better idea of what it looks like.

Here’s what I learned:

• Matching cotton thread on the front with invisible thread on the back helps reduce stress about making mistakes. While quilting, you can see just enough of what you’re doing, but when you take it out from under the machine and stand back, the imperfections fade into the background and it looks great! Similar to hiding the stitches on the back with a busy print.

• Borders and strippy quilts are a great place to practice free-motion quilting. You don’t need to worry about a wide open expanse to quilt, quilting yourself into a corner, or coordinating your stitches with the design in the piecing or applique. Just focus on one row at a time, getting from one end of the quilt to the other.

The heart vine takes just one pass across the quilt: dip down, stitch the heart, back up again, and then down for the next heart.

The twisting ribbon takes two passes of a simple wavy line. On the second line, dip down where the first line goes up and go up where the first line dips down.

• Don’t worry if the motifs don’t come out all exactly the same. Let them be their own lively selves and dance across your rows to their own rhythm.

In case you’re curious, I decided to echo-quilt around the baskets with yellow-orange-red variegated thread. It’s coming along quite nicely. =(^_^)= This quilt will soon be ready for binding and beading.

Here’s a tip for trying out new embellishment techniques: Make really small quilt sandwiches so you can get right to the fun stuff. This gives you a taste of the process as well as the satisfaction of finishing a project quickly. (The mini wall hanging on the right is just 4″ x 6″ without the beaded fringe.)

By the time you are finished with the mini, you will most likely be good enough at the technique to use it without fear on a quilt that you’ve already invested many hours in. You can decide if you like the technique enough to commit to a regular-size quilt. It will also help you decide which quilt to use the technique on.

If you try out different variations on many minis you will have a whole library of techniques (that you can see and touch) to choose from when it comes time to embellish your regular-size wall hangings. Of course you might just enjoy the small projects so much that you don’t want to go back to larger pieces. A group of minis artfully arranged on a wall would look fabulous!

I created this quilt as a sample for my new workshop, Bling Your Bindings! which is all about embellished binding techniques. The binding featured on this sample is Inside-Out Beaded Binding.

happy embellishing! =(^_^)=

Today’s tip comes to us from quilt artist and teacher, Marguerette Tate, who creates gorgeous dimensional floral quilts. She advises not to worry about making all the petals on flowers in your quilts exactly the same. Look at flowers in real life or photographs of flowers. Each petal is unique. If all your petals don’t come out exactly like the pattern, it’s OK, the flower will still be wonderful.

Give it a try, maybe even cut or sew the petals without a pattern and see what happens.

Here’s my first dimensional flower I made in Marguerette’s workshop last week. Tune in tomorrow for WIP Wednesday to see everything else that I made.

I don’t know about you, but basting is the part of quilting that I absolutely dread the most. I’m always looking for a good way to get out of basting a quilt. One of my favorite ways to baste is with leftover scraps of Wonder Under fusible web.

This technique is great for small wall hangings like my quilt, Penny for a spool of thread I, which is 9.5″ square. It can leave your quilt a bit stiff, but on the wall that’s a good thing … helps the quilt hang nice and straight. And if you’re just learning to machine quilt, a stiff quilt is much easier to maneuver than a floppy one.

Just save your leftover pieces of Wonder Under, remove the paper and cut it up into small pieces, around 1/2″ more or less.

Lay out the batting and sprinkle the Wonder Under pieces evenly across the surface. Spreading it evenly is more important than how much you use. Uneven application can cause ripples in your finished quilt. Use a little or use a lot, just keep it fairly consistent across the quilt. More fusible = stiffer quilt. Less fusible = softer quilt.

(If the quilt is large enough that you envision having to fold it for storage or shipping, cut the Wonder Under into smaller snippets and spread them sparingly. Large pieces of fusible can crease when folded, and creases are no fun to remove.)

Carefully place the quilt top on top of the batting and press with a hot iron from the center outwards. Press the fabric and avoid the batting sticking out past the edges in case of stray Wonder Under bits.

Trim the excess batting, then turn the quilt over and sprinkle Wonder Under pieces on the other side of the batting. Iron the backing to the other side of the quilt sandwich.

Turn the quilt back over to the front side, trim the excess backing, and then quilt as desired. If you need some quilting inspiration, visit Leah Day’s blog, 365 Days of Free Motion Quilting Designs.

happy quilting! =(^_^)=

Tiny doodles are not only fun to draw, they’re great for appliqué designs because when you’re drawing something very small, there’s not a lot of room for fussy details. That makes for easy appliqué. At left are several doodles I drew for appliqué blocks. You could fit all three of these drawings together on a Post-It note with room to spare.

When you’ve drawn a couple of doodles you like, just enlarge them to your desired size on the computer or a photocopy machine. I scan them at high resolution, then enlarge and clean them up in Photoshop, or sometimes use Illustrator and auto-trace them into vector artwork. Simple image-editing computer programs will do the trick as well. You don’t need the enlarged drawings to be picture perfect unless you are planning to publish the patterns.

After you’ve enlarged them to your desired size, you can print them out. If the lines are very pixelated or fuzzy from the enlarging process, use a lightbox or tape the paper to a sunny window and trace the design onto a new piece of paper.

If you are going to use paper-backed fusible web for your appliqués, remember to reverse the image in your computer program, photocopy machine, or flip it over and trace from the reverse side when you trace it onto a new sheet of paper after printing. That way the design won’t be backwards when you iron the fusible web onto your fabric.

Here are the results of the coffee cup doodles (I haven’t made any quilts from the cupcake doodle yet):

I Love You More Than … is based loosely on the small cup in the top left. I decided to simplify the cup even further by changing it to a straight-on perspective and added the stylized heart-shaped steam. The steam doodles are probably in a sketch pad or another computer someplace.

Latte is the pattern I made from the “large” coffee doodle on the right. I really like this cup and made quite a few variations of it. I seem to have forgotten about the swirly steam. I should make a block with the steaming cup. Maybe I could put the cupcake next to it.

The cup quilt on the left was probably supposed to be a cup of water. Come to think of it, that fabric reminds me of bubbles. It could be sparkling water.

The cup quilt on the right is A Cuppa Beads. Both of these cups are somewhere in my UFO hangar. I was using the cup of water as a demo piece for teaching bead embroidery so it’s not very far along, but A Cuppa Beads is probably ready for a border and quilting.

Below is a detail of the original Latte wallhanging. You will see more of this quilt in early 2010.
Happy doodling! =(^_^)=

Ever finish a quilt top and wonder how in the world you should quilt it? Leah Day of Day Style Designs has some tips just for you!

For auditioning a quilting design, first draw the outline of the blocks onto a piece of paper. You can make copies of this paper so you can try multiple designs without having to draw the blocks a million times.

Next play with the design! It’s really limitless. Start with simple shapes like outlining the pieces several times (echo quilting) and move on to more complex designs that ignore the seam “boundaries” entirely. You might have a certain theme or symbols you want to use in your quilt like leaves, fluer de lys, hearts, or celtic knots. The sky is the limit, and no, you don’t have to be great at drawing!

If your design is repetitive, like the star shape, all you have to design is what goes inside 1 diamond. Fold your paper and use a lightbox or bright window to transfer the design to the other diamonds for a full star shape. Oftentimes I just start with drawing half of my design, then fold the design in half and copy over so that it’s fully symmetrical.

Always check how your design will look by placing it under your actual quilt on top of a lightbox. Once you have a design you like, transfer it to the surface of your quilt using a water soluble blue PEN. Do not use chalk or chacopel pencils – they’re very difficult to remove. If your quilt is dark, use a soapstone or ceramic pencil to transfer the markings.

If you really get into making your own quilting motifs, you should consider using trapunto to make them stand out. This is a process where make your motifs puffier than the rest of your quilt. It may take a little longer, but the effect is very beautiful.

Now how could I pass on such wonderful advice without trying it out myself first? I have to say this is a lot of fun. I could really get into doodling quilt designs … and from drawing quilt designs it’s just a short step to quilting them. Here’s my first sample design.

For free motion quilting design ideas to get you started, check out Leah’s blog, 365 Days of Free Motion Quilting Filler Designs.

Put your hands in the air where I can see them. … Much better.

While there is a time and a place for perfectly matched seams, there is also an equally important place for moving on and getting those quilt blocks completed. Just keep sewing and with practice you can achieve those perfect seams one day. In the meanwhile you don’t want to rip your fabric (and your patience) to shreds. Quilt-making should be enjoyable.

If that mismatched seam intersection bothers you too much, try covering it up with a well-placed button or bead. This little trick can be so much fun that once you master your piecing you might not want to give up the embellishing!
Ric-rac embellished seams are another nifty option.
What are your favorite cover-ups?