The fabric if the week is Solar Flare Gradient. If you want some for your stash get it before it sells out. Through Sunday (or while supplies last) this fabric is 25% off or $6.75/half yard.

If Solar Flare is a little bright for you, maybe you will like the newest gradient, Sunshine and Shadows. It's a beautiful combination of golds and grays and was inspired by a custom gradient that I did for a customer.

Two of your favorite gradients are back in stock this week.

​Ruling Rulers
November 4 at Virginia Longarm, Goochland VA
Have you been collecting longarm rulers but are still afraid to use them? This class will get you over that fear and teach you everything you need to know to successfully use rulers on your next quilt. This is a great class for renters, new owners, and seasoned free-motion and edge-to-edge quilters.

I'm on a roll! I have 2 more veterans quilts done and am almost caught up.

This one is the courthouse steps pattern. I considered doing an all-over pattern but those light colored squares told me that I needed to do something else. Now, my #1 rule on these quilts is that the quilting has to be edge-to-edge. I will not custom quilt these quilts. If I did that it would mean quilting 20 a year instead of 40.

Can you see what I did here? I had background rows and the rows with the light squares. I wanted a swirl in the square so I did deep waves through the pieced block and a swirl on the light patch. On the background rows I did giant swirls. 

Now, looking at any of the motifs individually you wouldn't be particularly impressed but add the artistic concept of "repetition" and you've got yourself a pattern that looks pretty good!

Maybe you think you saw this quilt last week. You sort of did. Peg made 2 of these quilts.

I quilted both of these with a ribbon meander. I did one with a light thread and this one with a darker thread just to see how different they looked.

How about something a little different today?

Becky Brown is one of my local friends and is a member of Country School Quilters. She is known for her exquisite hand applique and hand quilting. If you participate in Barbara Brackman's block programs you will recognize Becky and will see this as being out of character!

Periodically our quilt club has challenge programs and Becky always steps way out of her box for the challenges. This piece was made for one of the recent challenges. She started by appliqueing the daylily with the intention of quilting it but then she went off the reservation and mounted it on a stretcher frame. I think it was a great decision!

​The real surprise here is that every piece of fabric on this came from one piece of the Coleus Gradient! How cool is that?

If you have ever made anything with my fabric I hope you will consider sharing it on the Customer Gallery. In return you will receive a 20% coupon for the shop.

I added 3 ornament kits to my UFO list for 2017 because I really want to get these things done and out of the way. I started making them around 1990 and, frankly, I'm over them. But these kits are expensive and I didn't want to toss them out. Besides I have over 120 ornaments made and I do still like displaying them.

This kit, Discovery, has been sitting partially done for at least a year. I love how it turned out but it's probably one of my least favorite to put together. This one is a whole lot of gluing smooth things to other smooth things so I know that this one will start falling apart before any other ornaments.  Most of the ornaments are put together mostly with pins and dangly things done with thread. I think that makes them sturdier.

This is the first ornament kit where the hanger is 100% glued together. That doesn't bode well for its longevity.
Complaining aside, this thing is going to sparkle like crazy on the tree.

I'm sure someone is going to ask about the time in this. There was a time when I did track time and the easiest ornaments had about 12 hours in them and I've had a few that have up to 60 hours. I don't track time anymore but I'd guess this one came in somewhere around 25 hours.

​If you think you might want to make this, I'm sorry, you can't. This kit has been retired and is no longer available.

After Marcy quilted 2 veterans quilts last week I decided to stay in veterans mode and loaded these 2. This first one is one of 2 almost identical sampler quilts. 

It's quilted with one of my favorite motifs for these quilts: ribbon meander. Ribbon meander is very fast and looks great on any quilt.

The second one was this pretty Hunter's Star. I spent a little more time on this one because I wanted to figure out a way to travel across and still do something a little special in the stars.

It took some cogitating but I figured it out! There are no starts or stops in the quilt except where I ran out of bobbin thread.  If I can make myself sit down and do some drawing I'll do a post to show you how I did this. 

You can see the quilting better from the back. 
​Both of these quilts have this pretty blue hand dyed backing. I love dyeing backs for these quilts.

Well, this is incongruous with anything I've been doing here on the blog lately but it was just another project hanging around the sewing room that needed to be cleaned up. I almost put it in a pile but, for once, decided that the best action would be to take a couple of hours and finish it.

This project started with 2 rolls of grosgrain ribbon. The Longarm Network, for some reason, has these rolls of grosgrain ribbon on the store for $10 each. That's such a bargain that I had to get some! They don't have them on the website but if you want some I'm sure you can contact them through the link and get yourself some. My first thought was to weave then in some way.

Then a week or so later someone brought some rolls of decorator weight fabric to the quilt club meeting. One was a roll of natural denim. A project idea was born!

I think I cut the denim to about 13" x 18" allowing for a 1/2" hem on all sides. I drew some guidelines for ribbon placement. There are 3 guidelines 1 1/2" from the bottom and right edges and 1 1/2" apart for the other 2. Then I pinned the ribbons aligning on those marked lines.

The ribbons are woven in the corner. I pinned everything in place and then topstitched using a smoke monofilament thread with regular thread in the bobbin.

The nice thing about this denim is that it's heavy enough that I don't need to make a quilt from these. I just had to turn under the edges and finish it off with my serger. If I didn't have a serger I'd zigzag around the raw edge and then turn the hem back and topstitch it in place.

A couple of hours of work and, boom!, they are done. I did 3 with red in the middle and 3 with blue in the middle. One note about the ribbon. It does shrink when washed so I pre-shrunk the ribbon before I cut it. I did that by cutting a long length, soaking it in hot water and then hanging it to air dry.
​
​I'm ready for next summer's patriotic holidays!

The fabric of the week this week is the Jungle Shades Pack and it's on sale 20% off through Sunday! Shades Packs are dyed when ordered so there's no limit to what you can buy. If you order multiple quantities it comes as one cut. For example, order 2 quantities for 1/2 yard cuts. Orders received by Wednesday morning (EST) will be shipped October 16. Orders placed after Wednesday morning will be shipped October 23.

It's been a while since I worked on the wall. But thanks to Marcy's quilting lesson Thursday I had some time (and motivation) to add a few more beads and a little background too.

There's still lots left to do!

Today's gem comes from Rene Iannarelli. Rene is a master of this style of art quilt. You will want to go to the Customer gallery and check out her other work.
Low Tide was inspired by Boca Chica beack in Brownsville, TX. At low tide you can see pilings, shells and rocks. She primarily used the Beach Walk gradient in this piece and added bleached palm tree bark for the grasses.

If you have made anything using my hand dyed fabric I hope you will consider sharing it in the Customer Gallery. In return you will receive a 20% discount coupon that's good for 3 months.

Marcy and I had a great time yesterday while she did my work. She quilted 2 veterans quilts for me and I did all kinds of other things. It was like having a magic quilting fairy for a day.

Generally I do not do anything to the quilt tops that I receive. They must come to me pressed and ready for quilting. This one had all of that border fabric on one edge. You know I'm a person who needs symmetry in my life so I did take 10 minutes to cut half of that slab off and sew it to the other side. I think it looks a little more planned now.

I taught Marcy the wavy crosshatch with this one. It's my go-to design for for quilts with blocks smaller than 6". When the block is bigger I usually want a denser motif.

Marcy said that she sometimes struggles with making the switch to moving left and right on the longarm (as opposed to how she quilts on a domestic machine). So to help her get in the left-right groove I had her quilt simple wavy lines back and forth across the quilt. 

I don't know who made this quilt but I really like it. The block is really simple but putting it together alternating direction makes the quilt look complex.

At the end of the day we both called the session successful. Marcy quilted both of these in about 3 hours and I can already tell that she is more comfortable with using the longarm. We have her next session already scheduled.