free motion quilting

Ten Ways to Mark a Quilt Top for Quilting

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I’ll admit it. I’m old school. I like marking quilting designs as opposed to just winging it and making it up as I go along, and my quilting quality is much higher when I have a line to follow. And to be honest, I mark designs for machine quilting and not hand quilting, so I guess I’m only sorta old school! 😉

Over the years, I’ve tried sooooo many different methods for marking quilts; some are easy and work well, some are only so-so but still good to have in mind just in case the easier methods don’t work for some reason. Here are ten different methods and tools to transfer quilting designs to your quilt top: Continue reading →

A Mini (Almost) Finish

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This week was pretty awesome on some counts, and kinda flat on others. The biggest awesome bit? LittleOne passed her drivers license test and is now driving herself around! Woohoo! My taxi hat is officially OFF now, forever I hope!! Less yo-yo-ing in the car and more quilting is never a bad thing, right?

With my new found productivity I was able to make good progress on this little quilt, and put the last stitches in the binding last night: Continue reading →

New Inchie Quilt! Where the Inchies Are Remake

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I’m totally excited about my latest finish! It’s a fun little quilt that I made for Valentine’s Day, and also just because! Just because I had some red and pink scraps laying around, and just because I wanted a quick-to-make project with Inchies. If you follow on Instagram, you’ve seen some sneak peeks already, but now I have some larger pics of the quilt and of course, the addicting little Inchies. Continue reading →

Word of the Year: Momentum

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I’ve decided my word of the year for 2014 is Momentum. It’s most definitely not “because”–I’m just not even going to get started on that. Yes, I know it’s the beginning of February, not January. While many people are reflecting at year end and thinking ahead to the new year, I’m still recovering. Yes, it takes that long to get over the holiday season for me some years!

Momentum is awesome while you have it. I know because I had it for many years, and I wouldn’t have been able to push a book from concept to completion in just over a year without it. These days, there’s no momentum. I move in fits and starts, and not always in a forward direction. Continue reading →

The Making of ‘Tis Just the Wind

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I promised (a very long time ago…) to share some of the construction details about ‘Tis Just the Wind, the project I made especially for the Wicked Blog Hop in October. When I decided to participate in the Blog Hop, I knew wanted to make something seasonal, but not screaming cutesy Halloween or spooky Halloween–Wicked was apt description of what I wanted the finished project to be. Continue reading →

Machine Quilting: Know Your Weaknesses

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In Part 2 of The More You Know @ DreamWeaver’s Quilts, Machine Quilting Edition, we talked a bit about checking your quilting design for trouble spots where you might be stitching over multiple layers of fabric that could cause the presser foot to hang up, making stitches smaller, uneven or just wonky. Being prepared by marking those spots in the pattern, repositioning your hands and the quilt for more control when approaching those trouble spots, and slowing down or even stopping the machine to make one stitch at a time can help keep free motion quilting stitches even over those rough patches.

What about your own weaknesses? What weaknesses in your technique could be causing wobbles and uneven machine quilting? Yep, we all have them and usually we know what they are, and sure, we’ve tried to get better at it all–we practice every day, right??–but still those weaknesses sometimes persist. There are a couple of specific things that affect the quality of my own quilting and I’ll share my correction methods with you!
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