If you use basting spray or fusible web when you quilt, chances are you have made the mistake I made yesterday — you’ve accidentally ironed some glue and created a sticky mess on the sole plate of your iron. Once that happens, the glue sticks to everything you try to iron. Instead of gliding over…
How should you fold new fabric when you get it home so that it will be ready to cut whenever inspiration strikes you? This helpful video from Nancy Roelfsema of On Point Tutorials shows one good way to fold your fabric so you can just take it off the shelf and have it all ready…
They are the UFOs (Unfinished Objects): unfinished quilts and pieces of quilts that take up physical space in the sewing room and mental space that most busy quilters can ill afford to spare. I have them. You have them. Every quilter has them. They make up a ghostly presence that haunts our sewing rooms. The…
For many quilters (myself included), quilting is really all about color: celebrating our favorite colors, combining colors in pleasing and sometimes surprising ways, and discovering exciting new colors we’ve never quilted with before. I am always interested and usually surprised by the announcement of the color company Pantone’s Color of the Year. This year’s color…
This morning I saw this very sad post in a quilting group I belong to on Facebook: “I placed a post back last month about the lack of motivation in quilting. I have just lost the desire. I now have figured it out. By looking at your post I’m just not any good. Even…
Anyone who has machine-quilted a quilt of any size knows you can use up a distressingly large amount of thread that way. It can be hard to guess whether the amount of thread you have will be enough to finish quilting the whole top. And it’s very annoying to guess wrong and run out of…
Do you ever have a piece of fabric you’d love to use for a quilt backing, but it isn’t quite big enough to cover the whole area of the quilt? That’s the problem I ran into with this little baby quilt (38″ x 38″). I had a large scrap piece of flannel that would be…
Want to make something cute, modern and really easy to decorate your Halloween table? I was poking around on Pinterest the other day and found a tutorial for this charming and simple-looking table runner from Rachel of The Fat Quarter gang. If there’s one thing I have a lot of, it’s leftover Halloween fabric in orange, black,…
Do you like to make quilts to decorate your house for Halloween? I do! Sometimes, though, I don’t have the time to make a large-scale project. This 14″ square wall quilt took about three hours to make from scraps I had in my sewing room. I’m grateful to The Seasoned Homemaker blog for the inspiration…
When you’re a new quilter, you can easily get frustrated and discourage yourself by biting off more than you can chew. It can be overwhelming to start out with a quilt that’s very large, for instance, or one that requires you to cut and sew a thousand tiny pieces, or master complicated blocks or advanced machine…
The Fourth of July (American Independence day) has always been a weak spot in my seasonal decorations. Meaning that I don’t have any Fourth of July decorations, or didn’t until a couple of days ago. That is not my only decorating sin. My children are embarrassed by the simultaneous presence of an Easter Bunny…
When you set out to make a new quilt, I’m all for throwing a project together out of fabric you already have in your sewing room. That’s how I made this quilt-as-you-go table runner for American Independence Day. I used the table runner pattern from my book, Quilts for Beginners, and made it even simpler…