The Winter Schminter Winner Schwinner

That's even hard to look at, let alone say.

As always, I am thrilled so many of you stopped by during the recent blog hop. To the many of you who became followers, bless you for making my day. To the many of you who had such lovely things to say about my blog being more fun than a barrel full of variegated thread (and seriously, how fun would that be?), bless you for making my head big for a moment or two at a time until the glow of my awesomeness was overcome by someone not having clean pants to wear to school and we were back to reality. To those of you who embraced the new definition of "geek" and made up your own words like "nutbird" and "yardening", I have a very special place for you in my heart.

To those who entered the giveaway, the bad news is most of you didn't win. But the good news is that one of you did - Sarah J.!

Sarah is a new follower whose number (16) was chosen by the random number generator. She geeks "quilting, science, and kids" and gives us this classically fantastic quote "My five year old son knows what a uterus is and that makes me happy." I really could not be more happy that her number was picked because for that sentence alone I wanted to give her a prize.

Congratulations Sarah! This lovely gift will be all yours!

Sorry I couldn't find any uterus fabric for you.

I really love these blog hops not only because I get so many new blogworld friends, but because the comments really make me feel like I get to know my audience better. I loved learning about what everyone loves to geek; plenty of Downton Abbey (forgive me, I'm trying, but can't get the crazed appeal beyond the clothes are stunning and Elizabeth McGovern can do anything) and Cake Boss, gardening, other hand crafts, and cooking, but some interesting ones were thrown in there too, like vintage cookbooks, accounting, and "old vinyl", which I have to assume means records and not that she likes to go on tours of kitchens from 1965. I also had to look up a couple, "Kumihimo braiding" and "envies", one of which I now realize my daughter uses to make friendship bracelets, and the other which I am just baffled by even after looking it up. But to each their own. As long as everyone geeks something!  

In Market Prep Insanity news, this week has been full of trying to get Taking Names done. It's going to be at least another week, but I am feeling more hopeful that this is not going to be the pattern process that never ends. They all feel that way at some point, some for longer than others. A preview of some new blocks I made that I truly love.

These purples just make me go "MMMMMMM"

News flash - I don't love orange, but I do love this block. Another bit of irony in my creative life.

My studio is in perhaps the most frightening state of creative mode it has seen in months due to all these scraps having to be auditioned. The rest of my house is also in creative mode, but for that I really don't have a great excuse. I'm really excited about this sample of TN, though, because it was inspired by a lecture my friend Judy Damon gave recently for our guild, all about color and using the color wheel for more than just a pretty picture on the wall and what "tint" really means beyond "what one does to one's hair to look prettier." I'm going to call this sample "Taking Compliments" or "Taking Complements,"  depending on who I would rather have think I spelled it wrong - quilters or grammarians. Judy will know what I mean, as will any of you smartypantses who know all about the color wheel.

Until the mood strikes me to overshare of myself with all of you again.....

If Nascar had a quilting race, I know who would win

I also know I wouldn't watch it because I don't enjoy Nascar, but whatever.

Did any of you have visions of being the first to get your Scrappy New Year blocks back to me? Give up the dream. As predicted, Angie Callbeck of trash barrel diving fame from the previous post has won. As usual, and much to the chagrin of Judy "Speed Demon" Damon, who will have to settle for some other number this time. We love Angie, but really, it's like you almost have to get up last month to beat her at anything quilting related.

I went to my guild's open sew on Saturday, whereupon Angie handed me her four blocks, which she had made the night before. Many of you may be saying "What??? I didn't even get my directions until Saturday afternoon! Cheater!" but let me assure you that no, she isn't alone in cheating. I gave her the directions early at her request, thereby becoming the enabler that I love to be so that I may then turn around and give her crap for being the first one done. I'm a fantastic friend.

But aren't they cute? Minus the fact that they look like I threw them in the bottom of my bag and forgot to take them out until today (no comment)? Nothing a little iron won't fix and I am so excited to have more come my way soon! There is nothing like the thrill of getting the mail when I am running a group project, and it has nothing to do with the hotness or lack thereof of my current mailman.

I was so excited to be overwhelmed by responses from quilters who wanted to participate. I should have enough blocks for two quilts! It isn't too late for you to throw your scraps in the ring too - just let me know and I can get the pdf to you asap.

All of 2009's hot new quilting tools - now being used in my studio

If there is one thing you hotties all know, it is that I am borderline proud of my lack of technical skills on the computer, don't own a smart phone, have never texted, and (here's a new confession) two of the three phones in my home still have cords. Yep. I'm way cool. 1988 ruled.

But I always considered myself a little bit more hip and now when it came to quilting. I'd never call myself a gadget guru by any means, but I love new products that make my quilting life easier and I will happily watch demos and probably buy them. I cannot resist an embellishment, and own more Angelina fibers than I know what to do with (quite literally, too, as I have yet to use any of them). I'll try new things and if I love them, you will hear about them incessantly until you try them just to shut me up (Jewel-it, anyone?).

So imagine my surprise this week when in the midst of my pre-market sewing frenzy, from which I am currently taking a much needed 30 minute break, I discovered two fantastic new tools which are both far from new. How did I miss these gems? And how can I prevent the rest of you from missing out? Well, I can write a humorous and informative blog post about them, that is how.

The first tool is this little chalk marking doodad from Clover. I'm pretty sure it is circa 2002 or even earlier, and also that I am last person on earth to discover it, but after using it for one millisecond I was hooked. I've long been a user of those basic blue markers for marking (when I even mark, which is about one time in 25), and just last week was bragging to my friends Judy Damon and Terri Sontra that I was pretty sure my blue marker was 10 years old and was never going to dry out. Yeah, it heard me from 50 miles away, and two days later I went to use it and it was dead. Well, lucky for me I had some of Judy's notion stock in my garage from a show NEQDC had done that weekend, and I had only to walk 40 feet to replace my marker with this chalk liner. It has a tiny little wheel on the end reminiscent of those carbon paper wheelie markers from back in the day, and is just a basic tube filled with chalk dust and seriously marks like a dream. I bought mine in bright red so that I couldn't lose it and with pink chalk because hey, a girl needs things to be pretty, but they come in other colors too. Check out that mark. Smooth and perfect and GONE once you sew on it.

1. 
   
   The chalk can also be rubbed off easily so as to redraw your lines when you do them too quickly and they suck, as seen here.



2. No, my hand is not really pink.


The second tool making my life perfect right now is aptly named "The Binding Tool", which I bought immediately after Terri Sontra of Purple Moose Designs demoed it at our booth last weekend. It was copyrighted in 2009, but it's new to me. I've stolen Terri's photo off her website not only because it is better than what I could take, but also because I want you to check out her online shop because she has some fabulous wares at very reasonable prices. And she includes chocolate in every order.

www.purplemoosedesigns.com/rotary.htm

Holy revelation in continuous binding glory. No more will you make your binding just a bit too big or a bit too small at the meeting point! No more will you twist the tales and swear a blue streak! As Terri promised, I did have to look at the photo tutorial on her site the first time I used it on my own, but the bottom line is it worked and I could not be more thrilled with this purchase. I'll never be a fan of binding, but this tool may make me less inclined to dread the entire event.

Finally, I've discovered a cool new fabric this week as I have been furiously whipping up a sample of my "Winter Whites" pattern for a silk vendor. That fabric would be Teflon.

Just kidding. It's silk, of course, and it is a bear and a half to keep from raveling, especially when you decide to ignore all advice to cut it on a dry day and instead wait for the wettest day in a week to start your project, but a little interfacing helps with that. Isn't it nice of me to have left some of the raveling in this photo so you could see for yourself? You cannot beat the richness of color and the sheen and it is making this project look like 8 million bucks. Lucky for shoppers, it's only $9. Doesn't it seem like a bargain now? Here's a sneak preview of the awesomeness of the silk colors. I'll post a photo of the finished project later this weekend.

Okay, it's back to sewing now. Please pray for me that Greta naps this afternoon so I'll have more to show for my day!

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign

This week I've been working on a quilted sign for NEQDC to hang out into the aisle at our booths at our future shows. It's a concept we saw done at Genesee Valley quilt show in June and we loved it so much that I was elected/offered/last one to say aye is it to make a fun sign for us to use. I came up with the concept of a two sided sign with our name in a block at the top and then each of us was to make two blocks representing our pattern style and I would throw them together in a row at the bottom. Quick, easy, and relatively painless. Ha.

Quick quiz, what does the NE stand for? I know, you thought it might be Naturally Elegant. Or Newly Emergent. Or Nasty Eggthrowing. All of which would be great names for my designers group, which is in actuality New England Quilt Designers Cooperative. Northeast would also work, and lucky for us, New England and NE on a map of the USA is the same thing. Good planning, forefathers. But Hotties, that is a LOT of letters to cut out for the sign, especially when you consider I had to cut them all out TWICE so I shortened it to "NE" with the group's blessing, and last night, thanks to Netflix, I was able to get all of them cut out and adhered to both main blocks of the quilt.

This morning I headed downstairs to take these cute little strips of our blocks and sew them to the bottom of each block. Gaze upon these strips and you will see one in each row from each member of the group. If we look at the top strip, that would be a Lava Lamp block from Judy Damon, a fun applique block from Kristi Parker, a snowbally block from Barbara Chojnaki, a Take Four block from Cary Flanagan, a Syncopated Ribbons block from moi, and a very fun Purple Moose from our head moose, Terri Sontra. I will be honest in tooting my own horn to say this block part of the sign was my idea and was brilliant.

What was not brilliant were my math skills. Just to review, 4 x 6 = 24. Not 18. Which is what I was thinking when I cut my main blocks to 12 x 16. Imagine my horror when I saw that this is how they would go together this morning, while I was still dealing with cramping hands from scissors last night:

Thankfully, I remembered that I suck at math but immediately rejoiced that I had at least done the central block with one side divisible by 4. Dumb luck at it's finest. So I just reworked the design (after all, if I couldn't do that I wouldn't be much of a quilt designer, would I?) and the result, I have to say, is adorable.
Here is one side:

Here is the other:

I decided I didn't care to put a binding on and take away from the blocks at all, so it's just poor-man serged using a big old zig zag. Much quicker than trying to set up and figure out my serger this morning.

If you are heading to Maine Quilts in a few weeks, please stop by and check out our sign in person! It will be its first time at a show and it needs some lovin'!

Diamond Dazzle Group Quilt - Part 2 or "God Bless the PDF"

A few weeks ago I announced my first group quilt project of 2011 and the response was overwhelming. About 20 quilters from the US and Canada quickly agreed to take part, making the quilt which will eventually result an epic project of international proportions.

I sent directions and templates for making diamonds in shades of hot pink, orange, and medium blues to all of my co-conspiritors, and not 10 minutes later the fun began. Given that templates might or might not copy exactly the same for everyone via email, I had taken the liberty to send it as a pdf file to ensure it would copy as exactly as possible. But one tester, Corrine Goeke, wisely suggested that I also make sure everyone knew the exact dimensions so they could double check measurements before cutting and I would not receive 27 different sized diamonds from 27 different (and possibly differently sized, but that I can't be sure of since I haven't even seen most of these women in real life) quilters. Excellent point, so I sent out those dimensions.

Almost everyone had no problem retrieving the pdf in it's correctly sized format. I did get a couple of panicked emails and phone calls, but every single time I did, before I even saw the first message I already had in my inbox or on my answering machine a second message of "Never mind! I figured it out!" I do believe these women are the smartest quilters I have ever worked with, and thank God, because askng me to try to explain a computer related issue is like asking a giraffe to live underground.

The next averted disaster was the discovery that I had not allowed for enough seam allowance in two of the four different options for strip piecing. Thanks to a couple of very smart and math oriented testers, we quickly got the word out that I was a dolt and corrections were made by one and all. By now I was sure every one of these testers thought I couldn't tie my shoes in the morning and was sick of hearing from me, but this is why testers are just so important to the pattern writing and publishing process. Anyone can make a mistake, and it's so much easier to have it made on a small scale and corrected than get a reputation in the wider market for innacurate directions. So I thank these ladies for making sure the diamond directions worked out and apologize for all the crazy emails of those first few days.

The fun part, at least for me, began only days after the directions were sent out when Judy Damon, whom I have nicknamed "Speed Demon" and feel she should legally change her last name to accomodate me, returned an envelope full of gorgeous diamonds in hot pink, orange, and blues to me. From that day on, I couldn't go to my mailbox without having it stuffed with 3-6 envelopes a day for a week! It was fantastic! I mean, look at this pile of envelopes!



Not all of the testers have sent their diamonds to me yet, but I just couldn't wait to show off what I have any longer. Every last one is stunning, and perhaps more miraculously, every last one is the exact same size! I heart whoever invented the pdf.

Don't they all look adorable? I truly could not be happier and hope everyone who participated will enjoy getting their package of blocks to make their own quilts back in the next 6 weeks or so. Hope springs eternal that I can pound this out in the timeframe I have set internally.

Next up - find my framing and contrasting border fabrics and get a scrappy version of this new quilt design together! Stay tuned.