Some Small Things – iPad Stands and Mini Quilt

I love making small things! Lately I’ve wanted to make a mini quilt. I have Carol Doak’s book Easy Paper Pieced Miniatures from 1998. She sells the pre-printed foundation pieces for each quilt from the book on her website here and they’re currently on sale. So I purchased two, one for the Scrap Stars and one for My Little Town. Each quilt is 12.5″ x 12.5″ when finished, so they’re pretty tiny! Continue reading “Some Small Things – iPad Stands and Mini Quilt”

lynnenewOctober 13, 2014October 6, 20142 Comments

Tips & Tricks

Patchwork Puzzle Balls with ScanNCut

As a follow-up to the ScanNCut class I just took, I thought I’d try to make something that is otherwise difficult to make by hand – a Patchwork Puzzle Ball. In Patchwork Puzzle Balls by Jinny Beyer (published 2005), there are numerous patterns for making stuffed balls using basic shapes such as triangles, squares, pentagons, hexagons, octagons, and diamonds. I made these before I had a ScanNCut and so I used plastic templates and hand-cut each piece. With the ScanNCut, I thought I would try and make one of the more complicated puzzle balls. Continue reading “Patchwork Puzzle Balls with ScanNCut”

lynnenewOctober 6, 2014October 8, 20146 Comments

Tips & Tricks

ScanNCut Class #2

I’m so happy to have found an Advanced ScanNCut class being offered at Rocky Mountain Sew and Vac in Arvada, Colorado. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to get that darn machine to do what you want in the vacuum of your own limited experience. Even though there is a multitude of YouTube videos and online blog posts about how to use the ScanNCut, nothing substitutes for some hands-on use with a knowledgeable instructor and a classroom full of eager students sitting in front of their own machines. Continue reading “ScanNCut Class #2”

lynnenewSeptember 22, 2014September 21, 20149 Comments

Finished Projects

More Foundation Piecing!

Foundation piecing is so much fun! I love that you can make a picture from fabric with only straight line seams. It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

I’m almost finished with Carol Doak’s Scrap Scramble block-of-the-month project that she’s been running on her Yahoo! Group here since last fall. You’d think that it would by easy to keep up with one block per month, but I managed to get 4 months behind! Now I’m caught up and and I’ve sewn all up the whole thing. It still needs a border, batting, quilting, and binding, but it’s at a good pausing point. Thanks to my hubby for helping me with the photograph! Continue reading “More Foundation Piecing!”

lynnenewAugust 18, 2014August 18, 20145 Comments

Tips & Tricks

Paper Piecing – Keeping It Together

Somewhere in my delusional mind, I decided I could someday complete a ridiculously large and complicated paper-pieced quilt that I saw in a book and fell in love with. The book is “A Paper Pieced Garden” by Maaike Bakker and Francoise Maarse. The book is full of beautiful paper-pieced blocks combined with appliques. The cover alone is stunning. Continue reading “Paper Piecing – Keeping It Together”

lynnenewJuly 28, 2014July 4, 20149 Comments

Reviews

Some Cool Quilting Tools

At the last Denver Mancuso Quilt Festival, I purchased some quilting tools that looked extremely promising. The first was a tool for trimming perfect half-square triangle blocks from Bloc Loc. The second was a set of tools from guidelines4quilting that promised to make cutting strips easy and ruler-slippage a thing of the past! Continue reading “Some Cool Quilting Tools”