design – Fabric Bias

Bali Pops Precuts and Bali Breezes Quilt Pattern

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. Continue reading Bali Pops Precuts and Bali Breezes Quilt Pattern

Hoffman 1895 Bali Batik Swatches for Electric Quilt

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working with a new Watercolors Bali Pop from Hoffman Fabrics to design a quilt. This Bali Pop has 40 2½” x 43″ strips of Style #1895 Handpainted Bali Batik fabrics, and came with a neat color card with a list of all the colors in the Pop, including color numbers and names. Sweet, right?

I had an idea for the quilt in mind, so I fired up Electric Quilt to play around a bit. Once I had a rough design, of course I wanted to fill it in with fabrics that matched what I had in the Bali Pop. I knew that there were already some Hoffman batik fabrics in EQ by default, so I tried using those. The problem was, I couldn’t tell if I had exactly the right fabric swatches in the sketchbook on the screen compared to the fabric I had in the Bali Pop.** What’s a girl to do? Continue reading Hoffman 1895 Bali Batik Swatches for Electric Quilt

Ten Ways to Mark a Quilt Top for Quilting

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 Ten Ways to Mark a Quilt Top for Quilting

Sunday Stash and InchieSee Playtime

Last week I made a quick trip to my LQS to pick up my Pfaff 1475 with its brand new motherboard. Ouch on that. The machine is probably nearing 20 years old and it’s been packed up in the original box for about five years. When I took it out a few weeks back hoping to use it when my Bernina needed repairs, the Pfaff was DoA on the sewing table. It was NOT a great week to try to sew anything! 😦

Despite being essentially a backup machine these days, I decided I should go ahead and repair it now since it’s a really wonderful machine (one of the older Pfaff machines that was made in Germany before Husqvarna Viking bought Pfaff out and moved production to cheaper areas), and if I didn’t have it repaired now it wasn’t likely to get done at all as the parts for it are no longer manufactured. And who knows? One of my girls might eventually decide to sew and need a machine… maybe… okay I’m reaching here I know!

While I was at the LQS, I did the mad dash through the fabric in hopes to pick up some more of that yummy Kate Spain fabric that I ran short on, and maybe a couple of bluesy aquas to go with it. Continue reading Sunday Stash and InchieSee Playtime

Work in Progress Wednesday–Finding the Groove Post Icepocalypse

Last week was definitely weird here in the South. The Snowpocalypse a few weeks back was bad enough, but the Icepocalypse was much worse for us. Augusta was the hardest hit by that storm, and here we were right in the middle of it all. Turns out ice storms are momentum killers…who knew? I spent last Wednesday trying to get things done on the computer in between power flickers, until Wednesday evening when it sputtered out and died entirely, and proceeded to stay out until… wait for it… Saturday morning! Not cool, Mr. Winter, not cool…

Quilting related work was almost non-existent. No power == no machine, no computer to work on patterns, not enough light for hand work most of the time and no iron of course. It’s amazing how completely dependent our lives are on having electricity at the flick of a switch, and even more amazing how little we realize it until it’s not available. As I said on Twitter, funny how some days you’d just like to read all day, until there’s nothing else to do and then you’d rather not! Continue reading Work in Progress Wednesday–Finding the Groove Post Icepocalypse

Work in Progress: From the Depths of the UFO Cabinet

I had an idea the other day that sent me digging through my UFO stash. Years ago, and I mean a LOT of years, I made a bunch of Jacket Jazz jackets. Remember those from the books by Judy Murrah?? I started making those in 1993 I think! I still have the jackets I made, except maybe one or two that I sold instead of keeping for myself. I LOVED making them, and I even taught a bunch of other folks to make them when we were stationed in Stuttgart, Germany. Heck, these jackets were my transition from sewing clothing and evening wear like this: Continue reading Work in Progress: From the Depths of the UFO Cabinet