When my hubby went away to Sydney for the football finals, I got quite a bit done in the sewing room and on UFO’s. He doesn’t mind me going off to the sewing room when he is around, but he tends to hi-jack me and drag me off to do other things!! Don’t get me wrong – I miss him when he is away and always look forward to his return.
At the recent quilt show I was demonstrating the olfa circle cutter. It is a great little tool and you always get an accurate circle. It took a little bit of mastering, but well worth it if you are going to be cutting a lot of circles for a project.
Me showing how it’s done!For instance, by just doing an edge stitching around your circle and cutting it into quarters or triangles you can do all the variations of Drunkard’s Path without doing curved seams. I know - cheating!!
“Playing with Circles” Quilt made by Fay Suley Fay – demonstrating Kaleidoscopes at show
There are so many modern and stunning quilts you can make with circles. The circle cutter demonstration was very popular and now I have a whole heap of random circles and some very holy fabric to play with!!
Shirley was showing her embroidery skills and it was creating a lot of interest. (That is her stunning underwater reef embroidery on the steps behind her).
I took my iron and portable ironing board along to the show and set it up. Unfortunately, one of the ladies accidentally ironed some fusible material and it got stuck all over the iron and made a terrible mess of both the iron and ironing board.
I have tried everything I know of to get the black spots and marks off the sole plate of the iron to no avail!
As for the ironing board, I whipped up a new cover using a tutorial from here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/iheartstitching
It was easy and I just used a bit of charity fabric this time, but next time I could really jazz it up with something funky.
Recently I purchased some polyester batting from a large craft supermarket. I chose a polyester ‘cheapy’ because the project I wanted it for was a quilt that was going to be washed a lot. If you see this one – my advice – don’t waste your money. I am going to chop it up and use it for stuffing. It stretches everything out of shape and you can’t get it to sit flat at all.
I have purposely blurred out the name but you get the idea?
I went back to the brand I love and I purchased the fusible one from a local distributor, Pauline Rogers from ‘Quilters World’. The fusible one was brilliant for the small project I was using it for and it remained well fused as I quilted it.
Pauline has all manner of items you may need for quilting and patchwork, and another tool I really love is the Charisma marking pencil. When you purchase it, she gives you both white and black leads, refills, and an instruction sheet which is important to read. I am rapt in mine and use it all the time now for marking.
Are you getting the message that I may be a bit of a quilting gadget geek???
Until next time………Dianne
