For a number of reasons, 2016 was a challenging year for me. However I still have many things to be grateful for so I’m not throwing myself any pity parties!

So I did not have a lot of quilting time available, but I did take advantage of a cold wintry weekend to make a top for which I had an idea brewing for quite a while.  This is the result:

This was made with what I call a “double-snowball” technique.  When you “snowball” the corners of a square, you take a small square, line it up in the corner of a larger square right sides together, and attach it by sewing a diagonal line down the middle then trim off the excess and press out.  You end up getting a somewhat round block that is commonly called a “snowball”.  Like the photo below:

However I did a variation of this by first sewing a border around my center square, then I attached a smaller square on each corner, trimmed and pressed out, then attached a smaller square to the corners again to make a block that looks like this:

After I made several of these blocks I sewed them together, sewed on borders, and ended up with the quilt top pictured, which had a squares and diamond pattern.

If you would like to make a similar quilt, click on the following link to see a tutorial for my Squares and Diamonds quilt.  You can also click on the Tutorials tab and get to it there as well.

Do you have friends or family members that are avid readers?  Well here is a quick and easy holiday gift you can make them!

This bookmark was made with cloth ribbon, a decorative button, and a cloth-covered pony-tail elastic.  Here’s how I made it. I used ribbon that was 7/8 inches wide and a button that was 1 1/2 inches round:

Take your ribbon and wrap it around the cover of a standard size book.  Lay your button on top of one end of the ribbon so that the bottom of the button is about at the end of the ribbon.

Lay the pony-tail elastic so that the top is about where the button holes are. Trim the other end of the ribbon approximately 1/4 inch from the bottom of the elastic.  I cut the ribbon with pinking shears just to make sure there would be no unraveling.  The goal is to be able to “button” the bottom of the ribbon to the top using the elastic, so you want it to be a little snug at this point. Remember, it’s just wrapped around the book cover to get some basic measurements, not the whole book or a bunch of pages yet.

Then with your ribbon right side up sew your button to the end. On the other end fold the ribbon about 1/2 inch around the elastic and stitch it closed.

There you have it!  A bookmark that won’t fall out or get lost.

You can also make this with a spare 2 1/2 inch fabric strip from a Jelly Roll, however that’s a little more time-consuming.  You measure and cut the same way, but to have clean edges you need to fold and press them under (on the sides and ends) then sew them down before you add the button and elastic.  However it does give you an opportunity to sew some decorative stitches on it if your machine has them.  Here’s one I made.  I rushed this as I was just trying it out, but would probably be a bit more careful if I was really going to give it as a gift!

So using a left-over Jelly Roll strip is an option as well!

I hope you have fun experimenting with colors and buttons to make some custom bookmarks for your loved ones!

My daughter and her husband are a military family.  They have lived the last 3 years in Anchorage, Alaska, initially to my daughter’s dismay (she hates cold weather).  But once there she embraced the natural beauty and outdoor adventures available, skiing, ice fishing, hiking, and more (picture a moose walking up to her patio door) and made some really good friends.

They are now being reassigned to a new base and she asked if I would make a going away quilt for one of her best Alaskan friends.  She chose a Friendship Star block and picked a variety of fabrics with prints that reminded her of shared interests and the fun that they had together.  Since she wanted to pick out the fabrics herself and ship them to me, the only direction I gave her was to try to get contrasting colors for each block so the star shapes wouldn’t blend with the background. It was a fun challenge to get the fabric in the mail and put the quilt together.

The end result is pictured below.  I left one square plain white so that she could write a message for her friend in that corner.  Her friend cried and cried when she received it.  A reminder that something made with love will always be a masterpiece!

Photos are from my phone as I forgot to take pictures with my real camera, LOL.

If you would like to learn how to make a Friendship Star block, here is a link to a great tutorial: Friendship Star in 5 Sizes.

I have woefully neglected the blog due to several commitments that have kept me away.  One of which included a quilt I’m about to finish as a gift to someone.  However since I over-bought the fabric I needed for the quilt design she chose, an idea for another quilt using the leftover fabric has emerged.  I will be posting that soon so hang in there!

I have been sick with a nasty virus folks, so my brain hasn’t been available to add part three of my posting.  But antibiotics finally kicked in and I’m starting to function again, so on to the last posting on the quilting and binding of my Friendship Star quilt.

First, I want to talk about my challenge doing machine applique on the inside curves of a circle cut into the center of a rectangle block.

Now I’m no expert at applique in the first place; only doing it twice before and only on the outer edges of circles.  So wrapping my mind around sewing down the inner edges of a circle cut into a rectangle was a bit challenging for some reason!  You can see the “messy” result below.

Plus, my sewing machine allows me to choose “applique” stitches. The one above may also be known as a “blanket stitch” on other machines.  My machine also allows me to do “mirror images” of stitches, so basically, I could choose the blanket stitch that makes a stitch falling to the left, reverse that and make the stitch fall to the right or vice-verse just by pressing a button.  That makes life pretty simple,  huh?

However I think I really just went too fast and lost control of my curves.  I ended up missing some stitches and had to go around a second time.  The stitches ended up looking more like a sunburst, with lines going out in random different angles instead of clean, more exact stitches as you would  normally see on an outside curve.  In the end, I was okay with this and considered it a “design element”, LOL.

However I just had to try it again on another sample after I had finished my quilt, which actually turned out better.  So again, the key is keep your needle as close to the inside edge as possible, go slow, stopping after two or three stitches then lifting your presser foot to readjust the position of your block so you can keep moving around the curve.

The one above turned out better than the one in the quilt itself :).

Machine Binding a Quilt

I am not the best at hand sewing so I have always sewn my bindings on by machine.  There are several good tutorials on how to do that, but I recently came across a new one that I tried and liked the result better than what I had been doing.

Normally, I was sewing the binding to the BACK of my quilt first, then to the front.  This time I sewed it to the FRONT of the quilt first, and liked that even more.  However, you have to feel VERY confident that you can sense, or feel where the folded over edge of the binding is falling in relation to the binding on the front (it has to fall past the stitching on the back) to know you are not accidentally sewing a very wonky seam or sewing into the front of the binding.  It’s kind of scary because you can’t see whats happening on the front, but I found I could actually feel where I was and didn’t mess this up.  Plus, if you are using a color of thread that matches the front of your quilt, it’s probably less scary. Here’s a link to an excellent tutorial on the Cluck Cluck Sew blog, a wonderful blog with great information and inspiration.

I always use 2 1/2″ strips for my binding. Below is a sample of what mine looked like.  Because I already had some straight stitching in the border, this additional line of stitching did not look out of place in my opinion.  So part of making the decision to bind in this manner might depend on what else is going on in your front borders, or the color of your thread and how much it might stand out.

So that’s it for deconstructing this quilt to provide a little insight on my thought process behind designing and quilting this project.  I hope it may give you some ideas and tips as well.