Material Girls Show and Tell

Last week my quilt group met so I thought I'd post the pictures from our show and tell. It's the best part of our meetings-so motivating! We're starting a Pizza Box Exchange this month. Each of us made a block of our choosing with the colors we want in our quilt. We put our blocks in a pizza box, then go home from the meeting with someone else's pizza box. During the month we then make one square for the owner of the box we took home, using their colors but choosing our own pattern for the block. Can't wait to see the results.

Diane S.'s table runners

Diane S.'s exchange block
Rachel's Pizza Box exchange block
Rachel's quilt
Rachel's quilt
Rachel's block
Rachel's table topper
Another of Rachel's table toppers

Close up

Rachel's quilt
Carolanna's Pizza Box exchange block
Carolanna's quilt
Carolanna's quilt. Experimenting with rickrack
Carolanna's quilt
Carolanna's quilt
Carolanna's quilt
Susan's Pizza Box exchange block
Susan's quilt
Susan's quilt
Corrie's Pizza Box exchange block
Corrie's purse
Corrie's Vintage triangle quilt
Diane B.'s Pizza Box exchange block
Diane B.'s daughter's skirt
Mary's Pizza Box exchange block
Maurene's Pizza Box exchange block
Maurene's work in progress
Kathi's daughter's baptism quilt
Kathi's Pizza Box exchange block
Monica's Pizza Box exchange block
Robyn's Pizza Box exchange block
Robyn's quilt
Nancy C.'s Pizza Box exchange block
Lenette's Bullseye friendship quilt
Lenette's quilt


Sew and flip stars designed and made by Lori. We will be making these next month!
Lori's Pizza Box exchange block.

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.

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.

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.

mini iron

Had to search high and low with all my quilting friends, but finally found Diane who had one of these mini irons. I was just about to start ironing my tree onto the background, but with all the intricate little branches I knew using a regular size iron was a disaster waiting to happen. This mini iron did the trick and it was so easy to use. I loved it. It's now officially on my wish list for upcoming Mother's Day/Birthdays/ Valentine's Day/Christmas, etc.
This is going to be a wall hanging and so far I'm very excited about it. After attaching the final borders, quilting around each limb will be my next big task. Wish me luck...

First attempt with a purse

So I finally hopped on the band wagon and found a purse pattern I really wanted to have and make. When I saw Heather Mulder Peterson's Bella Bag pattern, I knew I wanted to make it. I made the large bag from the pattern.
I used material I had purchased while I was in the Dominican Republic picking up my son from his LDS church mission. It's a fabric with embroidery already on it and I loved the colors. They didn't really have any quilting fabric, so I picked up this fabric instead. The pattern was easy to follow and would have been much easier if I had fabric that was the usual 44" wide, but this particular fabric was only about 21" wide, so I ended up having to piece the handles and make them a little bit shorter instead of having each handle cut from just one piece of fabric. I would have preferred to make the handles from the fabric used in the bottom half of the purse, but there just wasn't enough left. I used the grommets that just snap into place and I loved them. I will definitely be using them for many other projects. I used some fabric glue also in between the grommets like Heather recommended. The lining is just a blue/green plaid from my stash and I sewed 3 pockets onto it.
Can't wait to use my new purse now. I'm already looking at my stash to make another bag from this pattern.