testing

After I made my son's curtains  I started browsing around for fabric for my daughter's room.  This turned out to be impossible because my daughter is super particular.  Originally we had agreed to use a Clover Sunshine print but when I measured her window I realized that it is 70+ inches wide, I needed something wider than 44". Harper and I browsed dozens of websites to try to find a rainbow-y home decor fabric but she didn't like any of them.  And then we found Michael Miller's Mighty Stripe .  It is actually quilting cotton, but it is 57" wide. And it is glorious.  The stripes are 2.75" wide and they are bright and rainbow-y which is perfect for my rainbow loving 5 year old. I used the same tutorial  this time and I used blackout fabric for the lining.  We get quite a bit of sun here in San Diego and it's nice to be able to shut it out when we need to :) And it matches her very rainbow-y rug. We hung them up this morning while she was at school...

Our new place is almost twice as many square feet as our apartment in LA so I am a little intimidated by decorating for the holidays.  The dining room table was looking particularly bare so I thought I'd take a break from the queen sized quilt I have been working on and make a table runner. I saw this block when I was looking through 500 Quilt Blocks  (which is a fabulous book), it's called the Cheyenne block.  I used a variety of oranges, browns, reds, and yellows, including a couple of Juliana Horner prints from Joann's. I REALLY love that collection. It has been a while since I did any free motion quilting and it was a little rough.  I am a lot rustier than I expected to be!  Just don't look too closely. Now this can decorate our dining room table for 2 more weeks when it is time to decorate for another holiday. 

I have received a few emails asking if there was a pattern for my Remixed Geese quilt. The good people at Robert Kaufman contacted me recently and asked if they could share a pattern for the quilt on their blog, so if you are interested in making this quilt you can find the directions here  (it's free!). If you do end up making a quilt with the tutorial I would love to see it!

I had a little bit of a hard time deciding what to do for my Lucky Stars block this month.  I am not super happy with how it turned out, but it's going to have to do. I tweaked mine a little from the original block so that my diagonal points were different from the other points.  I'm not sure if that was the right decision. There is only one more block left for the year but I am considering going back and making the test block and maybe adding an extra block or two from the previous months This month for the do. Good Stitches Wish Circle we have one of our stitchers, Kirsten, who has taken on the responsibility of being a quilter for the first time.  She chose + and x blocks, which is such a fun choice.  I previously made a quilt  using a smaller sized version of this block but this was my first time making the 12" version.  She wanted the background and the plusses to be low volume, the rectangles at the end of the plusses to be black or gray, and the x t...

It has been a long week.  A few nights ago my son developed croup and has since infected the rest of us with a yucky virus. I did manage to get half of my design wall put together and I finished a few blocks from my Rocky Mountain Puzzle quilt.  The quilt is going to be queen sized so I am making 64 blocks.  That is 640 little half square triangles.  So. Much. Trimming. Even though my sewing room is a pretty good size, it kind of has a weird layout so there isn't much wall space (there are 4 doorways, including a giant sliding glass door).  My plan is to have two halves of a design wall that I can put together for big projects.  I made this using Elizabeth's tutorial , though I did use a gray flannel sheet instead of batting. One thing that I did not anticipate when putting this together was that the foam insulation was about 2" taller than my ceiling, so I had to take the sheet off, cut the insulation down and put it back together.  But I am loving ha...

I know it sounds scary.  If you have never tried custom white balance you might think it's something that professional photographers do, but it is actually pretty easy. What do you need? A camera with a custom white balance setting (dSLR cameras and some point and shoots, check your manual if you aren't sure) A gray card or a sheet of white or gray paper To shoot in a mode other than automatic.  Most cameras will only let you use custom white balance if you are in manual, aperture priority, or shutter speed priority mode.   When you set a custom white balance with your camera you are defining what white or gray look like in your current lighting situation.  This is particularly important when you are photographing a quilt because you want the colors of your quilt to be accurately portrayed.   This is a photo I took one morning of some fabric hanging on a branch in my backyard.  The photo is SOOC (straight out of camera) meaning it is completely unedited. Th...