Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Felt Flower Hairpins



My daughter Nikki and I (with some great help from my friend Tracey) finished making these cute felt flower hairpins this evening. Nikki's class is having a "City" day where some of the kids sell products and some of them are buyers. Nikki is a seller so we decided to make these hairpins. They're pretty easy and turned out very cute. Now my other daughters each want to make some for themselves.

Cut a piece of felt about 6 to 8" by 3-5". Fold it over and glue along the edge. Then cut 1/4" cuts up to the glued edge.Loop ribbons or yarn and sew the loops down along the glued edge.
Add another line of glue along the sewn edge.
Roll the piece allowing the glued edge to keep it rolled together. I used a low temp glue gun for this.
Glue gun or stitch a button in the center. Glue a hair clip onto the back and it's finished.

Monday, April 19, 2010

Scalloped border


Thank you Diane for lending me your scallop border ruler. It sure made it easy to make this scalloped border on Nikki's baptism quilt. I marked the border with the ruler, sent the quilt to be quilted and once I had it home, I cut out around the scalloped border lines.
So far I've sewn the binding to the edge of the quilt and now I'm ready to turn it to the back and blind stitch it down.

This is one of my favorite parts of quilting. I'm not sure why-it's not particularly fast. I must just like being forced to sit quietly, sew by hand, day dream and see a new quilt come to life as it's finished. It's very satisfying.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

To Quilt or Not to Quilt


I can't seem to finish this wallhanging and the only reason is because I can't decide whether I should quilt the background sky behind the tree and if I do quilt it, how should I quilt it. The pattern suggests weaving back and forth in long S-formations. It looks ok, but I may not be that precise of a machine quilter. If I leave it blank, does it look like I didn't really care about it and just slapped a tree onto a background, added borders and called it good? The tree took a tremendous amount of work, cutting it out and machine quilting with my feed dogs down every branch and limb. I like how it looks now and don't want to ruin it, but if I can enhance it a bit with machine quilting, that would be even better.
In the end, I may just quilt the borders, add a binding, hang it and look at it for months. Then if I get a brilliant idea, I should still be able to take it to the machine and quilt the sky. Sounds wimpy, but I'll be the first to admit my weaknesses with machine quilting.