Tips and Tricks

First finish of 2013! This pinwheel quilt will be sold at a fundraiser next weekend at my daughter’s school, Salesian High School. (Can you guess the school colors?) I wanted to make the quilt red, black, and white in the hope that some loyal alum would be moved to spend a lot of money on…

You know what the most stressful thing about quilting is for me? Fabric scraps. It’s not just the piles of scraps I have to clean up and sort through after every new project. It’s not just the ever-growing bags of scraps taking up space around the quilting room. It’s the fact that when I decide…

I’m pleased to announce that Denise Russell of Piecedbrain.com is the lucky winner of the giveaway DVD, [amazon_link id=”B001D94UPI” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Lynn Koolish Teaches You Printing on Fabric[/amazon_link]. Thank you to all of you who entered the giveaway. I’ll be hosting more giveaways at future Blog Parties and posting lots more quilting inspiration and…

I love to start new projects. I like finishing them, too, but I like starting them even more than finishing. Most of my new quilts start when I look around my overstuffed sewing room with a feeling of desperation because I have too many projects in mid-stream, and they clutter up the room so it’s…

I’m hosting a quilting DVD giveaway from December 9-15 as part of the Blog Hop Party hosted by quiltingallery.com. You could be the lucky winner of Lynn Koolish Teaches you Printing on Fabric (a $20 value!) To enter your name in the giveaway, just click the “Like” button on the Quilter’s Diary Facebook page any time between…

I’m in the process of writing a tutorial on how to sew these adorable and indispensable blocks, and used some of my gift-bag-making fabric to sew up a few of them. I’m not sure what I will do with them. First step: make a lot more of them, just for the heck of it. As…

If you have a bunch of blocks to piece together and want to do it the fastest, most efficient way, you need to know how to chain piece. Chain piecing is an assembly-line technique for sewing quilt blocks that saves time and uses less thread than sewing them one at a time. It’s very simple…

Here’s this week’s work in progress: a baby-sized rag quilt made from extra triangle blocks I made to put in the larger rag quilt I made a couple of weeks ago. I had some wonderful owl-themed flannel fabric that I decided to use for the borders. It had already been washed once, but I washed and…

I’ve been making a real effort to reduce the size of my fabric collection so that it all fits into the bookshelves where I store it in my sewing room. Right now I’m concentrating on the fat quarters. Over the years I’ve bought a lot of them because they’re just too cute to resist. Now…

Where would we quilters be without Flying Geese quilt blocks? Those handy geese play an essential role in making so many other blocks, from North Star: to Dutchman’s Puzzle: They also really dress up a quilt border. Here’s a nifty little quilt that uses them for both the center and one of the borders. A…

The more rag quilts I make, the more I believe that rag quilts really are the lazy busy and stingy frugal quilter’s best friend! The center of this snowflake quilt sat on my “Unfinished” pile  for a very long time while I held an inward debate on how to enlarge it to a comfortable lap quilt…

I am determined to use up my stash of four-inch purple squares, once and for all. So I’m in the process of laying out yet another purple quilt: Once this quilt is done I think I really will be at the bottom of the pile. Check out the other things people are working on at…