Just stopping in for a moment to thank you for your continued support in 2015. I appreciate each and every one of you!
Wishing you all the most joyous of holidays! May the peace and comfort of the season stay with you throughout the new year. Merry Christmas!
Now that the gift has been given, I can share it here! When my mom saw Journey, the plush horse that I made from bits of The Misery Quilt, she asked if I could make her one. That was a complete no-brainer! Of course I could make her one!
My Journey now has a sister! This little girl is also named Journey, since my mom liked the name and the story behind it all so much. So in my head, this is Journey(too)! 🙂 Continue reading
Years ago, I purchased an interesting little computer program at Quilt Market. Kaleidoscope Kreator™ does just what it says–it makes kaleidoscopic designs from photos, clip art, or drawings, which you can then print directly on fabric or paper. Alternatively, you can export the images to edit, adjust color and/or further customize in a graphics program. Sweet, right? Continue reading
I’ve been bitten. It’s also contagious, I’m sure of it. I fear there’s no cure. It’s the dreaded hexie bug!
To be clear, it’s not that I’ve never heard of hexies. I knew about them long before this latest fad hit the quilting community. 25 years ago, a coworker was busy making a hexie quilt, and she was kind enough to share the method with me. In all the years since, every time English Paper Piecing has come up, I’ve thought to myself, “Eh, not really my thing.” Seems I may have been incorrect on that point. 😉 Continue reading
Much of the last few years has been spent feeling guilty about all the quilting supplies and other “stuff” that I have that I don’t use, and when I do work with it on Inchie quilts (thinking “I should really finish all that because I have ten new Inchie quilts completed ready to pattern…”) or some of the other ideas I have for quilts, I get overwhelmed pretty quickly by all of the things I’d need to do to get back into the “business of quilting.” The patterning, marketing, teaching, social media mixing and many other things drive me away from my studio before I ever really get started on much.
I tend to create in fits and starts, with long periods of ambivalence in between. Sure there have been outside issues that have contributed to this cycle of short-but-wild bursts of motivation interspersed with longer bouts of near-apathy (lack of time, health issues, family things) but at bottom, it’s a problem in my head and heart more than anything else. The longer this continues, the more I miss the creative energy and motivation that used to be a part of my daily life. Continue reading
Years ago, I had a quilt plan in my head that called for a LOT of different fabrics. I thought that the best/easiest way to get the fabric variety I needed would be to use precut strips, and I purchased a bunch of different Hoffman Bali Pops from the Fat Quarter Shop, and found one “locally” at the Army Arts and Crafts shop in Germany. If you’ve been around a while, you may remember this post, in which Crazy Accuracy Freak Girl had conniptions over the state of those precut strips. They were crooked and cut off grain, and I couldn’t see how you could use those strips for anything that required any accuracy at all.
I heard from both Hoffman and Fat Quarter Shop about that blog post, and there were offers to replace and/or refund the costs of the bundles which was lovely of them obviously. I never bothered with that since I’d have had to mail them back to the States from Germany, and I didn’t plan on using them right then in the end anyway.
Fast forward to December of last year. The folks at Hoffman Fabrics wrote to tell me that the Bali Pops are now cut with a laser-guided fabric cutter, and they asked if I’d like to try the new strips in a project. I chose the Hoffman Bali Pops in the Gemstone colorway, and got to work designing! Continue reading
