This embroidered insect quilt combines a crisp blue, green, and white patchwork grid with six detailed embroidered insects: butterflies, a dragonfly, ladybug, bee, and beetle. The embroidered blocks interrupt the geometric patchwork just enough to make the bugs the stars of the quilt without turning the whole design into a novelty print. The quilt measures […]
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Having suitably aged this jelly roll, I searched for a pattern that would work with the ombre fabrics without relying too much on them for design. After a few weeks of searching, I settled on a design I’d used before, from a 1995 book by Evelyn Sloppy. Here’s the finished product: Closeup of the quilting: […]
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Many 40-strip jelly rolls — especially batiks, for some reason — include 2 strips of each fabric. For this one (Paradise Petals, by Island Batiks), I set myself a challenge: make two (small) quilts from the same fabrics, but in different styles.
Here’s the result.
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A design wall is a great tool for layout, especially for color placement — being able to step back and take a long view is a big help. But once the blocks are all arranged, how do you get a complex design across the room to the sewing table without mixing up the order?
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Usually I use batiks for color-shaded designs, but these Asian prints have been calling to me for a while.
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Rulers. All shapes and sizes. Rulers for cutting strips, for squaring up blocks, for cutting specific shapes … and for longarm quilting.
And they multiply like rabbits. How to keep them under control?
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Fabric and thread, of course. Rulers and other tools, certainly. But the real key is …Storage space.
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The back of a quilt can be just the substrate that helps hold it together … or it can itself be a focal point, just as important as the front.
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Like most computer-assisted quilters, I’ve accumulated several hundred digitized designs … but organizing them, and then finding just the right one, is always a challenge.
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Organizing strips is always a challenge. I love these little “price tag” sticky labels – handy to mark each fabric, easy to remove. The pattern is marked with corresponding letters, so it’s easy to keep track of what’s what.
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