On Saturday a group of quilters had fun making these cute little zippered pouches that look like tiny duffle bags! We just had to show you how nice they came out. If these look appealing to you we will offer it again next quarter in early December for making holiday gifts. The schedule will be posted soon!
If you have made a quilt for a newborn lately you know that BROWN and blue, or BROWN and pink are the colors this year. So we have all our browns (and beiges) in the store on sale this week at 30% off their regular price per yard. Yippee! So stock up for all the babies on-the-way or in your life already. Or whatever you might use brown or beige for (in my case it’s tree trunks at the moment…) Hope to see you soon! ~Karen
Pop Garden and Bijoux, the new lines from Free Spirit designed by Heather Bailey have arrived and are already out on our shelves. They are fabulous! For a wonderful online preview go here. I will start putting them up on the website on Monday, after I get back from a quick trip to Chicago to visit my daughter and go to a Cubs/Cardinals game! ~Karen
This is a question I have been asked more than once. We all have long strips of batting left over from the edges of quilts. I make alot of small quilts and use some of those small leftovers, but not everyone does that. Anyway, the answer is yes, you can piece batting, but what is the best way to go about it? Well, I discovered a new method the hard way and thought I would share it with you. I am working on this quilt: another in my house series of course. (this is my childhood house) This is still a work-in-progress…those borders are just glue-basted and pinned on while I ponder them.
I decided after-the-fact that it needed a border. I had filled in my picture all the way to the edges and had already heavily quilted the house, and found there was no room for a border. So I pieced on some backing all the way around first. I cut the backing strips on the lengthwise grain and measured carefully in an effort to avoid stretching and causing the edges of my quilt to look like lettuce leaves. Then I butted the edges of batting strips up to the edge of the batting in my quilt, and using a loose, wide zig-zag, stitched the extra batting on. This was a little tricky because I had to peel back the edges of the backing and the front of the quilt to get to the batting. Luckily I figured this out before I quilted the trees.
OK, all looking good… until I put it up on my design wall. The new batting was wavy and not laying flat. I was aghast. Not good. Many hours have gone into this quilt. Cant ruin it now. OK, have to find a way to fix this before I go any further. One thing I have learned in quilting…if you aren’t happy with it now, stop and get it right. Quilting the doo-dads out of it does not help wavy borders! So I cut the new batting off very carefully without cutting into any fabric. I trimmed up all the edges and dug around in my box of various fusibles to see what I could come up with. The answer was fusing strips of French Fuse over the two butted edges of batting. French Fuse is a very lightweight woven-knit fusible interfacing, used in garment sewing. I cut one-inch wide strips and lightly fused them over the edges of the batting. French Fuse is very stretchy in one direction so I cut my strips in the non-stretchy direction.
Quilt nice and flat, all fixed. Whew. Under normal circumstances, when you aren’t working on a half-done quilt, you can zig-zag two pieces of batting together and lightly press them flat after sewing, but in this case that method was disaster. So here is an alternative for you, if you ever find you need to make a quilt larger after you have already started quilting and can’t just pick it up and put it on a larger batting and backing. Hope this helps and feel free to leave comments! I’ll post a photo when its done!
Karen
Be sure to go to the Cotton Spice Workshop and see what is posted for workshop #7! And don’t forget to leave comments, as Karen Gass, the editor of Cotton Spice will be giving prizes at the end of the two-weeks! Have fun and hope you find a project you like there.
Cotton Spice, an online quilting magazine is sponsoring a two-week long summer workshop that offers a new free quick project everyday. It started on July 21, just a few days ago, so you can click on the calendar on their site to see the projects  that have already been posted. I will be posting a project here and on their site on Sunday, July 27th. So be sure to check back! Click on the orange logo to go to the workshop. ~Karen
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We had another group of amazing young sewers in the store last week for our second week of camp. Once again they had alot of fun and learned so much about sewing and knitting. Here they are with some of their many finished products. (and wearing the pajama bottoms they successfully made!)
Six campers spent the week here learning to sew with Kristy Taylor last week. They stayed busy sewing all morning and working with fibers at Yarns Etc, in the afternoon. They made pocket pillows, pillowcases, accessories, and a pair of pajama pants! Here they are at the end of the week with their finished products. Great job girls! Everybody seemed to have a great time.
  
Hope you had a great 4th of July weekend! We had alot of rain, so the fireworks were all postponed, but we are sure grateful for the rain. Well, the new Kaffe’s we promised are here, and we put them out in the store and on the web today. Ooh, you vegetable and flower lovers, Kaffe has done it again. Plus, he has yummy small prints to go alongside the big flashy ones. Also, if you didn’t get the email, we put all blues, greens and purples on sale today. Come help make room on the shelves. There are boxes and boxes stacked up back in the classroom full of fabrics from spring market. The kids are here for sewing camp this week and the store is hopping. Come see us! (And check back cause I am still working on getting them uploaded to the web!)Â
~Karen
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We are starting our Sizzlin’ Summer Sale Series today. We will have a different group of fabrics on sale each week this summer, and we are starting off with one of our favorite designers, Kaffe Fassett. All his fabrics will be 30% off this week, so hurry on in and stock up while they last. This is a sneak peak at one from his new collection coming soon!
