Archive

The trim pieces are all prepared and I removed all of the old ones from the quilt. I did a test with one of the new and improved catalog pieces and found that they are now strong enough to hold up to having the ribbon woven through them. I had to give some thought as […]

There are pros and cons to having your studio in your house. Pros Cons The biggest one – it’s much cheaper than renting a space. The con is that you end up with artwork in various stages of completion and art supplies all over your living space. Short commute: whenever I want to work I’m […]

Got another row of circles done and faced the daunting task of lining them up and sewing them together. This part is always slow going and tricky but is usually made a bit easier by the fact that I can mix and match the squares till I find one that fits. I can’t do that […]

And there is more than one way to do trapunto quilting.   In the hand-quilting method you hand-sew a piece of cloth (generally muslin) onto the back of the quilt face, following the pattern of the trapunto quilting you wish to achieve, leaving a small opening. You then stuff cotton or wool quilt batting (the kind […]

There are two main parts to quilting: piecing and quilting. So far I’ve just been piecing my “quilts” (which are really just quilt tops – see my earlier post, “A Quilt by any other Name” ) and not actually doing any quilting on them. For this quilt I’m attempting the trapunto technique, which is kind […]

I finished crocheting together the medallions on the side and hung Grace’s quilt up. I’ve been staring at it for a while trying to decide if it is done or not. I’ll probably keep it there on the wall in my living room for a while until I make my mind up. I do this […]

I was thrilled last week when one of my cousins who has been following the blog, Marianne, posted a photo to FB of a lace apron that she has in her possession: It was passed down to her from her mother Joanne who received it from her mother Mary. She believes it was made by […]

Pardon the pun, I couldn’t resist. I’ve been hand-sewing on the pineapple medallions that I crocheted. When I started thinking about the quilt for my great-grandmother Grace I asked for input from people from the family that had known her since she died before I was born. My cousin Joanne (Mary’s daughter) remembered her always […]

It’s been a productive if somewhat uneventful week. I finished the square for the dowry quilt from Grace’s quilt. The idea behind the dowry quilt is to take one extra square from each of the quilts and join them together to make a single “Sampler Quilt” that will form my Dowry Quilt.  Sampler quilts were […]

Really, I know how to count. I make a cheat sheet for each of the quilts at the start to help plan things out and to let me know how many of each shape/print/book page I need to cut out. The math is fairly straightforward: you take the number of a particular shape/print combo that […]