Got the "Tinkerbell" Stuff -- Sort Of....

Dawna at Bolts in the Bathtub pretty much keeps me up to date on what's new and coming into the store. For a few weeks now, she has been telling me that there was Tinkerbell fabric on order and she would let me know when it arrived -- lots of little girls, and some little boys, like Tinkerbell, but I've just never seemed to grow out of my fascination with the conniving little pixie!

While Dawna is good at keeping me up to date, she rarely calls and says, "I know you're going to like this -- you'd better get in here and buy it while it's still here!" So when she does make that call, I get my butt into the store! I went in yesterday and looked at the Disney panels and coordinates; there are three -- Tinkerbell, Pinocchio and Snow White -- and a quilt pattern for each.

Of course, I had to be a major pain in Dawna's neck; I looked at the fabrics, but couldn't really decide what, if anything, I wanted to do. The problem was that I liked the Tinkerbell fabrics and the Snow White pattern, so I went home and thought about it, then called back this morning asking if she could make a kit for the piecing pattern I liked, utilizing the fabrics that coordinated with the Tinkerbell panel.

That meant that she had to substitute out each and every one of the coordinates for this 48"x56" quilt, keep track of them all and cut and label the correct amounts so that I could make exactly what I wanted! Is this good customer service, or what? I expect a major eye roll from Dawna when she reads this...

Here are the piecing fabrics that she chose...

Then when I came in this afternoon, I chose one of the fabrics for the backing and a blue and yellow stripe she had in stock for the binding.

Here's a picture of the pattern, "Snow White Discovers the Cottage" Quilt, from David Textiles, Inc. The patterns and fabrics for all three of the quilts are part of The Disney Dreams Collection with original art by Thomas Kinkade.

The pattern is labelled with a skill level of Intermediate, so I can handle that. I've read through the directions, which look pretty straightforward. The only adjustment that may be needed to the original pattern is that the four snowball blocks in the corners are cut 8-1/2" square. If I do that, I will lose Peter Pan's arms or feet in one snowball and either part of Wendy or part of her little brother Michael in another -- YIKES!

Some thought may have to be given to this dilemma.......

Found a Very Cool Blog Today!

If you are interested in art quilts, you might want to take a look at "Subversive Stitchers: Women Armed With Needles", a blog that I found when I was looking around on Facebook this morning. Some beautiful art quilts pictured.....

Link is subversivestitchers.blogspot.com, or click here.

Today -- Playing with Fabric and Books

Still ripping that darned stippling from that small section -- surprising how much time it takes! But, of course, the mind wanders to the pile of fabric sitting on my desk, so have to get up every so often and arrange and rearrange them as well as daydream about possible quilts.

I found some of the pinks as well as the pink/grey/off white floral at The Quilted Quail in Ridgecrest CA, one of the darks at Quilt 'n Home (also in Ridgecrest), pulled the greys and more pinks from my stash and then supplemented with a quick trip to Bolts in the Bathtub last week.

So this is what I have so far to work with....

While I was browsing at Bolts, I found a couple of books that I also thought would work in well with this plan -- LOVE the cover quilt on Jane Hardy Miller's French Braid Obsession book
and think that would be absolutely beautiful with my fabrics.

And, just in case there was leftover fabric, there were some really good ideas using this type of focus fabric in Louise L. Smith's A New Twist on Strips 'n Curves. I usually try to use up "leftovers" on the back of my quilts and then slice the rest into 2-1/2" strips so they are ready for another project that I would normally buy a jelly roll for. But there are so many good ideas in Louisa's book that I just may make the strips narrower and get another great quilt out of the fabrics I've pulled.

Question: What do you do with your "leftover" fabric? For purposes of this question, we will define leftovers as too big to be scraps, but not big enough to stick back on the shelf -- let's say, under 1/2 yard.....

LOVE Pillowcases -- HATE Ripping Out Stippling!

The "pillowcases for the freshman" project has been a lot of fun -- above is the one that I made for January and gave to Destiny when we got back home from Australia and New Zealand. We had seen penguins on a couple of occasions on the trip, so this will remind her of how much fun we had!

The February one was very fun because I got to use pink fabric with hearts -- two of my very favorite-est things in the whole world!

Destiny came by this afternoon and I gave her a pair of slippers and the Valentine's pillowcase. Big smile -- she liked it!

She had a great new haircut!

On the other hand, I got this brilliant idea yesterday that instead of attaching the magnifying lens to my sewing machine and then doing my stippling, I would just skip a step and try to stipple really small. Well, needless to say, that didn't work out very well -- you can see a big difference between the size of the stippling on the left hand side of the picture and what I have been ripping out on the right.

For the tutorial on how I should have done it, click here.

Have to do the ripping with a magnifying glass around my ne ck;it is taking forever because I stipple using the Bernina stitch regulator set at a 1.25 mm stitch length -- not a happy camper today!

Great Start to a Thursday

I'm not usually awake at 6:30 am anymore, but this morning I woke up freezing at quarter to 5. Grabbed another quilt, but the sleep spell was broken. Did Facebook, e-mail and a couple cups of coffee; then glanced outside. Wowie! What a beautiful start to a Thursday!

Waited until 8 and then made a birthday phone call to Mary Ponce, the wonderful dear friend who started me on this quilting journey 20 years ago. We had lost touch over the last few years and it was time to reconnect -- I'm so glad I made that call! Now we have dates set to get together for some sewing and catching up -- hooray!

Every beautiful day reminds me that this is all about the people who have helped make us who we are....

Finished Susan's Neutrals Quilt Today

This was Susan Moore's quilt when I was working on it and had the entire center done, but nothing marked or stitched in the borders. She had sent me a stencil for the centers of each block and I had "stitched in the ditch" for the rest.

I was looking for borders that would complement the amount of quilting in the main part of the quilt so that everything would lay flat. The inside "celtic" style border is SCO-014-2.5 from The Stencil Company; the narrower outer border is #608 from Quilting Creations by DJ, Inc. I was not able to obtain contact info for Quilting Creations through an internet search.

Here's a close-up of the two borders. I used Mettler 100% cotton silk finish 50 wt. thread, both top and bottom, for these designs.

Now I can box the quilt up and get it in the mail for Susan to bind!

Whole Lot of Pajamas Goin' On!

I went down the street to Dawna Harrison's house yesterday to make pajama bottoms. Not being much of a garment maker, I just did what I was told -- cut, press, and run elastic through waistbands -- while Dawna did all the sewing. We finished NINE PAIR in 7 hours....



The island in Dawna's kitchen was turned into a cutting area....

Dawna first serged the hems and waists of each piece, then handed them off to me to press in the hems. She serged the inner leg seams and then the crotch seams. The rest of the work was done on her Bernina 630 sewing machine.




Two of my pajama bottoms were made of Minkee -- not a good idea for Dawna to wear black!

These three pair are mine -- the bottom two are made of Minkee. LOVE the skulls and flowers! The ones that gave us the most trouble, though, were the top giraffe print PJ's. Satin is not fun to cut, sew OR press, but they sure are pretty!

SpongeBob and computer nerds PJ's for my husband, Dan....

Snowman and Boise State for Dawna's husband Robert, a Boise State alumni...



And matching snowman pajamas for Dawna as well as North Pole pajamas featuring igloos, Eskimos and a cart selling Fish-cicles!

We think next time we spend a Monday together (the only day that Dawna's shop, Bolts in the Bathtub, is closed), we may do machine embroidery!

Bought a Present for My Kindle!

I love my Kindle e-book reader and take it everywhere with me. Weighing a touch over 10 ounces, about the same as a paperback book, I can stick it in my purse so that I can read during dead time. Since it can hold a few hundred books in its memory, it is invaluable for airports, airplanes and other places where you are just stuck and reading is a perfect way to pass the time. The only drawback I have encountered while traveling is that you are required to turn them off for several minutes during landing and takeoff, so a magazine in one's carryon takes care of that.

I used to leave on each business trip with 4-6 paperback books in my luggage; I would throw them away as the trip progressed, flinging myself into a Barnes & Noble (needed a Starbucks stop anyway, right?) to replenish as needed. Then my father-in-law bought me the Kindle as a birthday gift in late 2008 and my travel life got noticeably better!

So when I recently ran into an on-line ad for decalgirl.com, I had to check it out. On this website, you can find skins for many styles of phones, netbooks, Kindles, playstations -- you name it, if it's a piece of what my husband calls "electronica", they probably have a skin for it. The one I picked for my Kindle 1 (first generation) is called Cora.

It arrived within a few days via USPS; basically, it's a set of decals that you lift off the backing and press to the device. They adhere easily and you can lift and re-position them until you have them placed perfectly. It was pretty easy to do. The back is all in one piece; the front in several that you lift and place separately. There's even a "bonus" skin for the charger...

I have a PINK zippered case with an additional outside zip pocket for the charger; I think the whole deal looks pretty cool! So now I am going back to decalgirl.com to look at skins for my BlackBerry (I'm not really a red person) and my Samsung netbook....

Another Gourmet Dinner -- My House

Always fun to have the gang for dinner! This month's menu was inspired by the February 2010 issue of Food & Wine magazine article, "Invent Your Own Cocktail Party Menu". We didn't have cocktails, but I did make some of the food along with my own favorites.

The quilted love knot placemats were a gift from my friend Gayle Farmer. The basket in the lower left corner contains sun-dried tomato foccacia.

The recipe for the foccacia is in Lora Brody's book on pizza and flatbreads; there are three recipes for pizza dough (garlic, sun-dried tomato and pesto) and directions for making foccacia from each of the doughs. The dough is made and allowed to rise in a bread machine, then dumped out, shaped, allowed to rise a second time and then baked in the oven.

The bibb and radish salad with buttermilk dressing was made from the F&W article and was very good.

The main dish, Chicken Peperonata, was also from the article with a minor substitution; I could not find Peppadew peppers in my local grocery stores. I looked them up online and then used sweet cherry peppers. I made mashed potatoes with roasted mushrooms (F&W used semolina with the mushrooms) and garlicky broccoli (instead of F&W's broccolini).

Every week, we get a box of organic fruit and vegetables from Abundant Harvest Organics and I had plenty of broccoli and potatoes that I needed to use up, so I just sort of mixed and matched what I had with the menu recipes.

For dessert, I baked an apple pie and served it with caramel praline ice cream -- yum! Dan always helps me with the pies; he does the peeling and slicing with one of those handy dandy gadgets that we call the "mutilator" -- I'm sure it has a better name!

Next month, dinner is at Fay and Leith's -- Fay is absolutely the best cook I know, so can't wait to go there!

Bernina Webinar -- The New Cutting Tool

Went to my local quilt shop yesterday to see the webinar broadcast by Bernina of America about their new cutting tool. The tool can be used with any Bernina machine that has embroidery capability as all of the sewing is done "in the hoop". The webinar showed how the tool worked as well as ideas for using it.

The blade on the tool is very sharp, so several layers can be cut at the same time. The tool could be used not only for cutwork, but was also demonstrated making dimensional appliques from suede, leather and other difficult to cut fabrics as well as reverse applique on a sweatshirt.



After the webinar presentation, Dawna Harrison (one of the shop owners) demonstrated its use by doing cutwork on a tea towel. Some very important tips were given in the webinar and Dawna went over these as well: First, make sure that your fabric is stiffened, either by using starch or, as the webinar recommended, Mary Ellen's Best Press. If the fabric is soft, you won't get optimal results.

The design can be transferred to the sewing machine using several methods; Dawna used a USB stick. She hooped the tea towel with a layer of Aqua Tear for stabilizer.The first sewing is done with the embroidery foot attached and the machine threaded to do the outline of the design.



After the outline is stitched, the cutting tool is attached, the stitch plate is changed to the cutwork stitch plate (comes with the cutwork tool and is specific to your machine model) and the top thread is removed, although you may leave the bobbin in since the blade of the cutting tool does not reach the bobbin case. Second big tip: Turn off the sensors that stop the machine when the thread breaks or runs out; since you are not using thread, the machine will keep stopping unless you turn these off.

The tool has four directions, represented by numbers on the top of the blade -- if you look just above the blade and to the right, you will see the number "1". After the tool cuts everything in that direction, the machine stops and the color bar area will indicate that you manually change the direction. It's easy to do; you just reach in and turn it.

At this point, all of the cutting has been done....

A couple of pictures of Dawn lifting out the fabric from the cut areas with the point of her scissors.

Then she re-threaded the machine for the embroidery portion of the cutwork design, removed the cutting tool and reattached the embroidery foot. She also smoothed a square of Aqua Mesh Plus, a sticky backed water soluble stabilizer to the back of the design to improve stitch quality. One thing I am learning about machine embroidery is that the proper stabilizer is absolutely the key to good results!

Embroidery done....

Here is another tea towel that Dawna had done previously. She held it up so that you could see the cut out areas. After the stabilizer was washed out, there were some threads and fabric showing, but she felt that two factors could have made the work better:

One: She did not stiffen the fabric enough for the tool to get a clean cut.

Two: The webinar showed a foot (#29 or the new #44, echo and cutwork foot) attached to the machine while using the cutwork tool. Dawna did not use a foot for the embroidery immediately above, but she did use it for the blue embroidered piece that she did for the demo. It looked like the piece using the foot got better results.

A few things interested me here: One thought popped into my mind when I was watching the demonstration of dimensional applique on the webinar; could you use fusible stabilizer so that your applique could be directly pressed onto its background? I want to play with this further. I also feel that the cutting tool could be used for various trapunto applications, since the most tedious part of that technique is cutting away excess batting.

Some food for thought and a new toy to play with!