Stitching in the Barn

I was sick last weekend when I wanted to finish this quilt so it had to wait until yesterday. It's about 33 inches square and made from a kit by Connecting Threads that I got for Mother's Day last year. It's made exactly as pictured in the directions but I pieced the blocks the way I preferred. I thought about changing it up some. I wanted to put something in the light print squares other than the letters but I couldn't decide what to do. However, once I traced out the letters and put the fusible on the fabric, I noticed the fabric went perfectly with them. In the end, I'm happy I didn't do something off the wall.  Since this is a wall quilt, I free motion quilted it very tightly. I had so much fun doing it and picking out what I wanted to do in each square. I think my favorite are the pinwheel and the spool blocks. Quilting it around Valentines' Day also influenced my design. In the blue corner squares, I used a red variegated thread and did a sti...

Well I took a long unintended hiatus. If anyone is still following this blog, thank you. I'm glad to see the back of 2011. It was a long, hard, stressful year for me that I'm glad to see finished, though there were some highlights. I've made a new commitment to sewing this year and I've already started! So far this year I've made two pincushion thread catchers from the Abby Bag pattern . I bought the kit for these from Connecting Threads last Mother's day. The kits are no longer available and most of the fabrics are sold out also :o(

Lately I've been wanting to sew but I haven't been able to decide what I want to sew. I keep seeing so many awesome projects online and not able to choose one. I did eventually manage to get off the computer and sew up a couple of things, so far, this week. While at the Dallas Quilt Guild Show, me, my MIL & my daughter saw Cynthia England demonstrating her Picture Piecing technique. Her booth was filled with amazing examples of quilts made from patterns designed by her using this technique. Her process looked easy so we chose that as our next group project. It was very hard for the three of us to decide but we finally chose this kitty quilt pattern & kit. I also bought a pattern for a rose block that was 1/2 off. After we got home, we took out our patterns and looked them over. Woah, there were a lot of tiny lines all over it! It looked so hard! We went to the computer to check out her website. She has a great video tutorial, and a print one, with plent...

My mother-in-law came to visit last week during Spring Break. It was fun. We had a quilt project me, her and my daughter were in the middle of before she visited. It was great for National Quilting Day. It was like we celebrated all week. We completed them, well mostly. I still need to attach the binding on my daughter's quilt. It was a kit we picked up a while ago called Misty Pines by Jeri Kelly. It finishes at 7.75 inches by 21.25 inches. It came with a paper pieced center and all the fabrics to finish it except batting. We bought three to work on them together. It was my daughter and MIL's first quilt. It was a great idea to buy a complete kit for their first project because we didn't have to spend the extra time debating over choosing fabric and some of the pieces were already cut to size so we could get right to working on them. They came out great. Here's mine: And my daughter's: The kit didn't include a binding so we went out to buy...