To enter visit We All Sew for more details.

To vote visit the official We All Sew/BERNINA Pinterest Fabric Design Contest board. Vote for as many entries as you like. I hope you will vote for me. If you are interested in trying your hand at fabric design, let me know in the comments below so that I can vote for you.

Here are my designs:

Hexacats

Kokeshi Stripe

Pandamonium

Modern Herringbone
 Can you tell that I love polka dots?

Here’s the link again to the official Pinterest board where you can check out all the other fabric design entries and vote for your favorites. Thanks for your support!

Introducing Wednesday’s Words, a blog post series of illustrated quotes to brighten your day, your Pinterest boards, and your Facebook profile.

Zéphirine Drouhin is an old bourbon rose that is known for its unusual ability to bloom in the shade. This image is a detail of a quilt I made for my daughter. I used Tsukineko inks to paint my daughter’s face as the flower fairy, and embellished the quilt with hand embroidery, beads, and hot fix crystals. Like the Zéphirine Drouhin rose, I wish for my daughter the ability to blossom even during times of shadow.

Zéphirine Drouhin was shown at the Art with Curves art exhibit, International Quilt Festival Houston, and Road to California quilt show, and featured in Quilters Newsletter Magazine’s Photo Finish. See the whole quilt and find out more here.

To download this free Zéphirine Drouhin Facebook Cover, right click on the image and select “Save image as” to save the Facebook Cover to your computer. Then upload to your “Cover Photos” album in Facebook and enjoy! (For personal, non-commercial use only.)

I don’t know about you, but I love a surprise while creating things–when you don’t know exactly how something is going to turn out when you’re finished.

It’s fun to plan out a new project, but I find that if I plan it out too well I lose interest. It’s almost like the project is so complete and real in my mind that there’s no reason to make it in real life.

These cute felt owl appliques are an extreme example of this kind of surprise. My friend Jessica asked me to make some of these wonderful embellished felt leaves to decorate the lovely purses that she sells. They looked like fun so I said I’d love to make some leaves. I brought out my felts and embroidery supplies, and got right to work (or play, depending on your perspective.)

Before long I was deep into my new project, and the result was not a charming branch of beaded leaves, but the adorable owls you see above. How I got from leaves to owls I’ll never know. That certainly was a surprise!

I decided to make enough owls to fill up a quilt, but they might need a branch full of embellished leaves to perch on, so stay tuned for chapter two of The Owl Saga to find out what happens next. … Will Jessica finally get her leaves, or will the Owls keep them all for themselves?

Have you ever been surprised by how any of your crafty projects turned out? Have you ever given up on a project because you planned it out too well and lost the element of surprise? I’d love to hear about it!

Join me on Pinterest for felt and owl fun!

Greetings from South Africa

I recently returned from South Africa and wanted to share a bit of inspiration with you.
Here are some of the colors that caught my eye. Enjoy!

The feathers of these birds were as iridescent as butterfly wings

Love the polka dots on these handicrafts

Ocean waves of Durban

I couldn’t resist this stone wall along the walkway at Cape Point

Or the little yellow roofed cottage at the end of the path

The view from the other side of Cape Point is not bad either

What colors catch your eye on your travels?

Want to find out more about my trip to South Africa?
Visit my Grain-Free Fabulous blog: Gluten-Free in South Africa

At my daughter’s elementary school this year, students got to learn about cooking foods from other cultures, antique fire trucks, heart transplants, badminton, making batik fabric, and much more. I taught several sessions on quilts and quilt-making. Here’s a quilt made by myself and 28 third to fifth graders.

Isn’t their artwork fabulous?

If you’d like to share your love of quilting with children you know, here’s one way to do it:

• Get some PFD (prepared for dyeing) white Kona cotton. I prewash it just to be sure.
• Cut fabric into the desired size squares and iron freezer paper on the back.
• Have children draw/color their artwork directly onto the fabric side with Crayola fabric markers. Warn them not to draw anything important in the 1/4″ seam allowance, but as you can see in some of the blocks above, this is a very hard thing for kids to remember if they really get into their artwork.
• Remove the freezer paper and iron the blocks according to directions on the marker package.
• You can have the children help you sew the sashing strips and blocks together or simply assemble the quilt top yourself.
• Let the children help tie the quilt layers together with rainbow-colored yarn.

How have you shared your creativity and love of fabric with the children in your life?

And fiber of a different kind, coconut to be exact, goes into my coconut-date chocolate bonbons. After all, quilters need to get their chocolate fix so they can keep on quilting. While these lovely bonbons are not calorie free, they are healthy and delicious. Click here for the recipe.

What fiber projects are you working on this summer?

I’ll tell you what I think so far, then you can download and read it for yourself. (If you don’t have a Kindle there’s even a free Kindle Reading App for your phone, computer, or tablet.) If you don’t like it, you can always delete it.

Cut, Crop & Die is an enjoyable summer read with funny, likable characters. It’s comforting to read a book where the characters share an obsession with you. Like the creative quilters in Jennifer Chiaverini’s Elm Creek Quilt Novels, Kiki Lowenstein and her pals in this mystery series are avid scrapbookers. Quilt guild meetings, crop parties. Stuff my friends and I do. Hopefully except for the murder-mystery part, that is.

So this summer when you’re lounging at the beach, why not read Cut, Crop & Die. It’s really too impractical to lug your crafting tote through all that sand, and the sun and salt water is no good for photographs, anyways. (Although you could get in a good fabric dying session at the beach.) Not only will you enjoy a charming book, the scrapbooking tips sprinkled throughout the story just might spark your creative juices and perhaps inspire you to bring out your scrapbooking supplies when the sun goes down for a crop party of your own. If you’ll excuse me, I have Cut, Crop & Die on my Kindle app and afternoon sunshine calling, so enjoy!

What’s on your summer reading (or crafting) list?

Could have something to do with the fact that every little thread and bit of lint shows up like crazy on a white background. Still, I prefer the way my quilts look on a white drape.

Maybe it’s because I use a lot of strong colors, as well as a fair bit of black, and sometimes my quilts fade into the background when displayed on a black drape. Or I might just be used to seeing art hanging on white walls at galleries and museums, and my quilts tend toward the art quilt side of the spectrum. (Take a look at these posts to see what quilts and textile art look like on white: Virtual Fiber Art Show | A Gallery of Quilts from IQA Long Beach 2009.)

Either way, I’ve been packing for my booth at the SCCQG Meet the Teachers event tomorrow, and I’ve been busy picking threads off my polar fleece drape. Your guess is as good as mine as to why I’m using polar fleece for my drape, but it’s too late to help that now. Here it is:

If you’re going to Meet the Teachers, stop by and say hello. I’d love to meet you!

Step by step Carolyn takes you through the process from chaos and clutter to organization and finally, how to maintain your organization so you don’t find yourself buried in clutter a few months (or weeks) later. Great idea! Staying organized. Why didn’t I think of that?

Whether you have an entire room or just a corner to devote to your quilting, you’ll learn to make the most of your space.

Here’s my cutting station with rulers, mats, scissors, and rotary cutters accessible and ready when I need them. It’s also convenient and easy to put the tools away here when I’m finished with them, so they’re always right where they belong when I need them!

Carolyn also covers storage options for fabric, thread/notions, projects/UFOs, portable storage for quilting on-the-go, and long-term storage/display. Her friendly step-by-step method helps make each task seem manageable. Lots of eye candy to inspire you to make the most of your quilting space, large or small.

Here’s my CD-turned-fat-quarter storage area. It’s right by the door to my studio and this is where my new fabric goes when I first come home with it. (Other sizes of fabric fit well, too.) This way I can always find my new fabric when it comes time to use it, and it doesn’t get mixed up with the already-washed fabric. Looks like I have a little more space left before I’ll have to do a few wash loads of fabric.

I’m still working on the rest of my studio, but will give you updates from time to time. Feel free to share photos of your quilting space. Together we can beat the clutter and create a fabulous place to quilt!

The Modern Blocks Quilt Along is starting today! You can join in at SeamedUp.com. Stop by each day to find out what that day’s block is, learn more about the block’s designer and fabric, and see what color and fabric choices other members use when they make the blocks. (That’s always one of my favorite things about quilting: seeing what colors and fabrics other people choose.)

The blocks for the Quilt Along come from the book, Modern Blocks: 99 Quilt Blocks from Your Favorite Designers. These 12-inch blocks are fresh, fun, and beginner-friendly. So come quilt along with us!

What is SeamedUp, you ask? It’s a new online fabric crafting community where you can keep track of your fabric stash, patterns, and projects, discover what’s new in the world of fabric, as well as share photos and ideas with fellow fabric enthusiasts. Sign up at SeamedUp or take a video tour below with founder BryeLynn.