For the last month I’ve been sick with a nasty cold, followed by an equally nasty sinus infection and hacking cough. The only thing I felt well enough to do was make fabric gift bags. (Did I mention that I’m a bit obsessed with making gift bags?) There are several things about these bags that…
The good thing is, I got this braid quilt mostly finished yesterday. The bad thing is, I produced a new pile of scraps. Teeny little triangular scraps. Little scraps like these always make me feel guilty. I can’t figure out what to do with them, but it seems wasteful to get rid of them. I…
I know many people love to sew by hand, but I am not one of those people. I’ve noticed that my sewing machine is faster, more accurate, and, with all of its clever decorative stitches, more inventive than my fingers. It’s machine quilting all the way for me, baby! That’s why I was so pleased…
When you make a quilted wall hanging, one thing you need to decide on is how you will hang the quilt on the wall. There are several different ways to do this: 1. Use Quilt Hanging Clips These clips fasten onto the edge of the quilt and get mounted on a nail in the wall….
A hanging sleeve is a fabric tube sewn to the back of a quilt to make it possible to hang the quilt on the wall. A dowel or a rod or a flat board is slipped through the tube, then suspended from nails or screws on the wall. Hanging sleeves are also used to mount…
Of course you want to show off your nifty new quilt by displaying it on the nearest wall. Here’s a way to make a quilt hangable that involves no hand sewing at all! As soon as I found this technique at the Alzheimers Quilt Initiative website, I had to try it on a quilt of…
This easy gift bag is fun to make and can be adapted to any season by just changing the fabrics. The bags are durable enough to use over and over, unlike wrapping paper that just goes in the trash after one use. Supply List for Wine Bottle Gift Bags You can use lots of different…
If you are a new quilter, a charity quilter looking for fast and simple projects, or a lazy quilter like me, rag quilts are perfect for you. You don’t have to be a precision cutter or sew a perfect 1/4″ seam (I’m not very good at either, and I’m quite happy with the way my…
Around our house, we believe that you can never have too many Halloween decorations. I didn’t actually finish this little ghost quilt until the day after Halloween, but I’m posting the instructions so that if you want to make one, you’ll have a real head start on next year! If you concentrate, you can get…
I’d been quilting for years before I ever heard of rag quilts. The minute I saw one, though, my lazy quilter’s instincts told me I had stumbled onto something good. A quilt that doesn’t need binding! You can quilt the blocks before you sew them together, so you don’t have to drag the whole quilt…
The appeal of this perennially popular quilt block comes both from its symbolism, which evokes the log cabins built by pioneers on the American frontier, and from the arrangement of the block’s light and dark fabric-strip “logs.” In its traditional form, Log Cabin block is divided into a light half and a dark half, with…
I love making quilts for Halloween. I especially love pumpkin quilts, which can have either a Halloween theme or a Harvest theme (or both.) Here’s a small gallery of favorite pumpkin quilts I’ve made or photographed over the years. The top photo is a quilt of my own design, using some fat quarters of fabric…