Sunday Sewing with my pals

 I spent all day Sunday sewing and watching episodes of The Closer (love that show!). I finished the Sparkling Prisms quilt and went back to the flying geese project. I may eventually finish this one...

if I don't have to keep doing as much unsewing as I do sewing.

I no sooner started working on it than Conrad came along to help. He settled in pretty quickly and fell asleep.

It's pretty hard to sew with a cat on your quilt. 

It seemed a shame to wake him up. It's sort of like when they get comfy on your favorite chair. Do you make them move, or sit somewhere else?

A Tasty class!

I had a great time on Saturday teaching these lovely ladies how to make the Tasty Table runner at Cut Up and Quilt. You can see we had lots of different fabric choices!

 Most of them finished their top, or just had one border left to put on. I don't think they thought they would get that far!

 We talked about all the ways we could use these braids in our quilting projects.

 I will be teaching another session of this class in March if you missed it the first time.

 I spent all day Sunday sewing. I finished the pp diamonds, and then went back to work on the flying geese project I have been working on for awhile, off and on. I had to do some thinking in between, especially when I got to the borders. I ran into a snag today and had to do a lot of unsewing. Not a fan of unsewing. It's not finished yet, but after much figuring, I have the pieced borders ready to sew on. I have a class tonight and the book fair tomorrow night, so I won't get much sewing done for a few days.

My book fair at school starts tomorrow. This is the first time I will be hosting a week long book fair in the new library, so I am excited, though a little worried that I might have forgotten something. I have always had to have the fair in the gym because the library was up stairs and the carts are too heavy to bring up the stairs. And since the gym is needed every day for PE classes and lunch, I would put it up in an hour (with help from students), sell books for 2 hours, and then take it back down. So it will be a new experience for me to hold it all week. The book fair co. rep came out to help me set up, and she was a blessing. I was still open for students, so she did most of it. I helped some and finished it after school Friday, so I think I am ready! 

Peas in a Pod is popping up everywhere soon!

 If you think....hmmmm...this looks a little nicer than the pictures she usually takes, you would be correct.  This picture was taken by McCalls Quick Quilts Magazine. My Peas in a Pod quilt is featured in the April/May 2013 issue, coming out soon. I was so surprised last night to see it on their facebook page. My design is a lap size quilt.  As you have probably guessed, I am pretty excited about this! I just recently taught several sessions of this class at a local quilt shop. It's a great quilt for beginners, but any quilter will have fun making it.

I have made several versions of this quilt over the past 2 years, but this one is definitely my favorite. I used bright prints (lots of dots!) that would be great for a kid's quilt, but would cheer up most any room.I thought long and hard about what design to use in the quilting. A circular pattern would soften the straight lines and angles of the quilt and also give it some movement, so that's what I did.

 I chose this bold multicolored polka dot for the back....I love polka dots!

 I was pretty worried while quilting it...I was really busy at the time, school had started and  I had lots of quilt classes lined up to teach. What if my machine started acting up? It's pretty dependable, but sometimes when you least suspect it, it will decide to mess up. (I'm pretty sure it's not the driver!) It all went well in the end, thank goodness!

I like to do a photo shoot of my own when I finish a quilt top and also when I finish the quilting so I have a record of the quilt. Sometimes there is a great lapse of time between the two. Do you photograph your quilts?

Half hexies, hexies it's all the same, isnt' it?

I was doing some prep work last night for my Tasty Tablerunner class on Saturday. I had done a mock up of the runner using scraps and had tons of the half hexies left over. 

So I played around with them, using 2 to make hexagons. I know this is probably cheating, since we all know I still haven't gotten back to my hand-sewn hexagons, but it really is cute and very easy to sew together by machine. I have used the HexNMore ruler to make these hexie pillows too, but they don't interlock, so I wanted to try this.

 I sewed them into rows last night and sewed some of the rows together. I am going to leave it incomplete for now as I want to show it during class on Saturday as another option with this ruler. I don't know about you, but I usually don't buy a ruler unless I think I will use it several times. I will figure out how to make a pattern using the rulers I have. But I am really sold on this one and have already used it in 5 or 6 projects.

So since I am teaching a class using the ruler, I want to show different things that can be done with it so that the students have more options to use it. The Tasty Tablerunner pattern does come with a template you can use if you don't want to buy the ruler, which is nice too. 

A little more Zig and a lot of Zag

 I made a few more blocks last night and started putting them together. This will be a small quilt/tabletopper, though you could just keep making them to make a large quilt. I don't want to scare people away from taking the class so I am keeping the project small.

Most of the students I have had in class just don't enjoy paper piecing very much. I hope by showing them this new method that they will be more excited to try it. Plus making the blocks with all scraps is just fun!

I hope to finish it tonight. What was your favorite paper pieced project?

Zig and Zag

 I spent some more time last night working on these scrappy blocks. I love using batiks and have lots of smaller pieces, so it's a perfect choice for this block.

 Conrad decided to get in on the action...

 taking a little nap amidst all the scraps.

I really do make a mess when I paper piece! 

Super Sunday Sewing

 Does this look comfortable to you?

I spent most of Sunday sewing. I made quite a mess as I went through some of my smaller batik pieces to do some paper piecing. I find paper piecing is more fun when you don't have to worry about what fabric goes next.  So this project is going to be scrappy.

 I don't know if everyone makes this much mess when paper piecing, but I seem to. Since I am making each block scrappy, I can use some of the leftover bits on the smaller areas of another block.

How do you precut your fabrics for paper piecing? I usually cut strips and then use the straight edge to line up with the last piece.  I made the blocks yesterday using the freezer paper method, so I don't have to tear off the paper when I'm finished. I am debating whether or not to teach it this way. I usually teach pp the traditional way, sewing right to the paper, but I really prefer this method. People seem to have a resistance to pp because of past problems, and I hope that by doing a scrappy project it might be a little more appealing to most quilters.