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Monday, June 30, 2014

July 2014 New Releases





See the latest Christmas in July of Anita Goodesign For lots of lovely machine embroidery Designs for Christmas and other December Holiday's such as Hanukah.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Organizing Machine Embroidery Designs


I have wanted to do a project for several years as I got more and more buried under paperwork. I do machine embroidery and one company, Embroidery Library, is very generous with free designs. I have always printed off the page showing the design so that I wouldn't lose track of the designs I had. Well I ended up with a huge stack of papers, but with no way to punch holes in the papers until a month ago when I got to review this three hole punch by  Swingline It was terrific for putting the holes in the papers.


Granted it is a bit expensive but if you have kids in school that needs paper holes punched in paper or your own crafts that need a 3-hole punch, this is a marvelous machine. I have even punch out a stack of misprinted paper so that I can put it in a notebook and use the unprinted side to write on.

 But then how do I sort them all and keep them divided by category as just the Christmas designs was a stack over an inch thick? Well again I got to review something that worked wonderfully well and it was these transparent tab dividers. 


 
 


Instead of writing on actual tabs and then realizing you wrote things wrong and need to start over and then you end up with a mess and not enough tabs. This system works so well because you can print the 'tab' headings on one piece of paper through your printer. You can get the file to use to set up the page at the website listed on the packaging. The packaging also tells you how to set it up yourself, but I was a bit to lazy to try that. So I printed out the tabs I needed. Since I had such a huge stack, I ended up using 2 sets, which equaled 16 tabs. I'm not sure that I have the divisions the way I want them, but it is nice to know that I can just make up new tabs as needed.




At that point, I popped everything into this 3 D-ring  Binder and I was good to go. I opened and closed the binder multiple times while sorting the papers and never had a bit of trouble and the D rings help to keep all the papers sitting in a nice stack when not being used, instead of being bent on the circle rings that most binders have.

All told with the help of three (free for me!) Amazon Vine review products, I was able to tackle a project that had been on the back burner for a long time. I was very happy with all of these products. And very happy that it is easier to now find the perfect design when looking for it.



Friday, June 13, 2014

Frogs for Project Linus




Several years ago I was given a box of juvenile quilting fabrics including yardage of frog prints in different sizes and in pink and blue color ways. As my last few, well actually most, of my Project Linus quilts have been in the red white and blue color families, I was ready for something with a change of color palette. In February 2014 The Quilter Magazine had an article on making a child's quilt called "What a Hoot". It was the perfect size for a Project Linus quilt and as it also used fabric in varying sizes of the main print, I decided this would work for my newest quilts using the frog prints. However as I started setting up the blocks and seeing how it would look, I realized that some changes were in order since the background of the prints was the identical blue or pink background and so I was having too much of a good thing. Still basing the quilt layouts on the owl quilt, I did some adjusting and swapping fabrics in places and got a pink frog and then a blue frog quilt top finished including the borders. Also when sewing the pink quilt together I mixed up the blocks and for the life of me couldn't figure out how they were supposed to go together so I did my own thing. I have also set aside a length of yardage for backing for each of the quilts.

I still have a good amount of yardage left and also some precut squares and strips in various sizes, so now I get to do what I really love, making up scrap quilts that looked planned but are basically 'happy accidents' depending on what I have to work with. I once read a letter to the editor of a quilting magazine that asked why anyone would want to make scrap quilts as she hated them. All I could think was why would anyone want to make a quilt with two fabrics and 12 identical blocks when you could use 100 fabrics and have twelve similar and coordinating blocks? The joy of quilting is we all get to do what we want to do! I'm hoping to be able to make at least three more quilt tops before I run out of the frog prints and coordinating fabrics.                                                        

Monday, June 02, 2014

Benefit for Eric Hawley

One of the great benefits for those of us that sew is being able to 'whip' up something for a charitable thing when needed. Well I don't actually 'whip' up anything anymore, but I have enjoyed making a project to benefit Eric Hawley a husband of a friend of mine who was in a very serious car accident about 2 months ago followed immediately by a stroke. So not only did he have to recuperate from the accident injuries but the stroke ones. I think he spent something on the order of a month or more in the hospital. With three young children at home, a full time job, his wife Bailey was going in all directions. At this point he is home and continuing to heal but the bills remain. His friends and family are throwing a benefit for him to help raise money to help pay off the bills and all that out of pocket stuff like parking, extra gas to go back and forth to the hospital etc. If you live in Northwestern PA, you are more than welcome to attend the benefit, here is the link from Facebook for the details https://www.facebook.com/events/1417878755141713/

I wanted to contribute to help and since I'm not up to attending or cooking anymore, I made something for the auction they will have. It gave me a chance to do something for someone else and fine tune some new sewing skills that I have been working on, especially making and using hexagons. I made a butcher's style apron with coordinating potholders. On the potholders, I tried echo quilting for the first time and it was a bit tricky with all the angles and when appliqueing the flowers down I had deliberately set them at angle and only decided later to do the echo quilting. Bear with me as the photos are my first attempt at using the digital camera. If you like what you see here, go to the benefit and see if you can win them :)

 
My favorite apron pattern design McCall's 5174 (out of print) . Easy to make so you have time to embellish. Being modeled by Annabelle.

 
The pocket started out as a large hexagon . Sewed the two layers together, turned them inside out, folded the flap down and then appliqued it to the apron with an applique stitch (#45 on the Janome 7700)

 
Hexagon flowers and a hexagon flower bud with a rick rack stems. I didn't have the right color of rick rack, so tried to tone it down with more thread, but I'm not sure it worked very well.

 
Hexagon flower potholders with echo quilting. Flowers and binding is sewn down with an applique stitch (#45 on Janome 7700) They are about 8" square. My own design, no pattern.


 Quick and Easy Hexie Quilts is one of the books I have been using as reference in my quest to lean how to make and use hexagons.