Does this sound familiar? An epidemic in the Wendover area!!!!

How To Quilt Your Swoon - Jenny Visit's The Sewing Bee

As you can see from Sue's SuperSwoon in the previous post - a Swoon, when completed, is a large and quite unmanageable king sized beast! I know that some of you brave soles intend to hand quilt your Swoon top. But for those who want a quicker solution I have been looking in to options for Long Arm Quilting. For those of you now wondering what a Long Arm Quilter is ( strange mental pictures abound!) I thought i'd explain a little.

To turn your Swoon from a single piece of fabric into a warm and three dimensional quilt you need to layer it up with some waddding and sew to secure these layers together. This can be done by hand or machine. However with a quilt of this size, trying to quilt it on a standard domestic sewing machine is very challenging as the quilt will be too big to move under the harp of the machine. A long arm sewing machine is an industrial sewing machine that moves over the quilt top (held on a frame) rather than the quilt moving through the machine. This method of quilting gives your quilt a dense snuggly texture.

The very lovely Jenny who is a local Longarm Quilter and works on many of my quilts will be coming along to the Sewing Bee at St Anne's on the 6th May to show us some samples of long arm quilting and she will have her computerised menu of patterns to allow you to look at and think about quilting styles if you would like to go down this route for your quilt.

Jenny will then be available on Thurs 12th of June for 30min appointments all day at The Workroom if you would like to book your quilt in to be machine quilted. Your quilt top doesn't necessarily need to be completed by this date as you can plan and choose a design in advance of finishing as long as you know what your final dimensions will be, but there will be a special rate available for all quilts booked in on this day. You will then be able to drop your finished tops off at The Workroom and pick them up from there when they are completed - how exciting!

For anyone from the Evening Bee who can't make the daytime events - do email Helen and let her know if you are interested in a separate session with Jenny. We will see if there is sufficient interest to run an evening session too.

Now I'm off to get some Swooning done, newly galvinised! debs x

Sue's Super Swoon

Sue's Super Swoon at The Workroom this week. Wow it's wonderful - good encouragement to get on with mine ( still languishing at one block at the moment) but there's plenty of company in the 'one-block-done' gang I think! How are you getting on with yours........?

Periodic table for stitchers

Now this periodic table I could have learnt....

I'm addicted and planning my next swoon

Here is my first machine pieced quilt in many years...........

The lights are behind washing out some of the colour and some of my flying geese have blunt beaks!!

Next job is to layer up and quilt, I'm going to hand quilt as my sewing machine needs to lie down in a darkened room to recover.

The hardest part was choosing the fabric combinations then placing the blocks..............

 

Need to create more floor space to lay out the next swoon..........

Man Baskets and more . . .

It is Claire, checking in with my current quilting project. As some of you may know I am recovering from another back op which went well but only time will tell it's real success. To aid my healing my wonderful mum,Pat, took the kids away for a holiday. The house was peaceful so I got sewing.

Before the op I had plenty of time to prepare for the long rest ahead so I decided on a manageable hand sewing project that I could cope with lying flat on my back. After my last op I finished the mammoth job of hand quilting my whole cloth quilt.

Anyway, I love bold colour and have longed to do some more sewing with Kaffe Fassett fabrics. I made my sister a lovely 40th present quilt and some of you may remember the stripy quilt I made one retreat day. 

Made for my sister

Retreat day quilt

So I decided on an Orange Peel project which is really simple, small and manageable. It involves paper piecing and applique. I prepared lots of 4" squares and orange peel shapes. My background squares are neutrals and the peels are bright and bold. A lot of fabric came from my stash but I just had to buy some new Kaffe Fassett charm squares. I don't think my husband has noticed yet! 

I am trying so hard to be random in my selection of fabrics as I pick them out of the bag but I do struggle with that! 

So here is progress so far and I am loving the way the squares look together. 

Sneak Peak

Having a lot of fun working on my Scandi Arendelle Quilt. What are you working on this Easter?

It's good to give......

This is a first for me, making a quilt for a family member that doesn't actually live in our house.....cousin Izzy is 2 next month and I thought an Owlie type quilt would be a lovely gift, that is until I saw how beautifully it took shape following a quilt consultation with Debs at the PlainStitch Workroom on Saturday, and had the most amazing help from her lovely biggest girl who picked out the most perfect fabric in terms of colour and pattern to go with the Adorn It Owl fat quarters I had been stashing for a while. It was lots of fun, but with a deadline of a few days I needed to crack on so got to work on my new Janome and hey presto the quilt was finished, topped off nicely with a made to match pillow case following the wonderful Mum & Daughter class this week with Debs' lovely biggest girl again at the helm :)
Well, it's good to give away something you've made that you have put real thought into and that you know someone else will love, or so I thought.....I hope I manage a smile and don't have a tug of war over it when the moment to hand it over comes ;)

My other gift is another fabric basket this time in a pretty butterflies print (the receiver loves butterflies, birds, owls, hedgehogs....so I thought I'd incorporate all of the above into one basket!) Now I just need to hand these all over with a smile and remember to actually let go.....

Some recent additions

I have now  joined the lampshade making addiction club! Thanks Deb for your hints in coping with what seemed like a monster lampshade. I took note of the advice of a friend to help, I made do with a husband, he now shows visitors the lampshade HE has made!!!!

I think I have also joined the fabric basket addiction club, is there no end to this?

Probably not as the  fabric shows quilt and fabric shops, I think it really needs filling with some lovely new fat quarters ........ Oh dear!

My lace pillow now has it's finished log cabin cover cloth

How To Share Your Sewing............

.......if you signed up today to become a blog author I wil be e mailing you your 'invitation' in a moment. You click accept on your  email and can log in with your google account if you have one ( for example if you have a gmail email account). If you don't already have a google log in it will prompt you to create one. This is to protect the blog from spam, as you have to 'identify' yourself when you want to log in to post. You don't need to add your full name, you can even invent a sewing name ( is it the name of your first pet and your sewing teachers surname? Or is that something else?!?)...

I digress! Anyway - when you've signed in it will take you to a page that looks like this

This is my page so it has PlainStitch and The Sewing Bee and various other options, but yours should just show The Wendover Sewing Bee. If you click the little orange pen icon you can start your 'post' on the blog. The page will look like this;

You start typing in the white box and when you are happy to post it on the blog you press 'publish'. If you want to 'unpublish' you just press 'draft' to change it, or delete to get rid of it all together.

It's just like word, you can change your font, colours, spellcheck etc using the icons along the top.

What should I write? Anything sewing related that you'd like to share! Work in progress? Inspiration? Introduce yourself and what you like to make? It's totally up to you. Claire and Julia have kindly gone first and so you can read their posts here and here to get the jist.

What shouldn't I write? Remember its a public blog so don't tell us you keep your spare key under that plant pot. Please don't advertise, be kind etc etc....you know the score.

You can add pictures by clicking on the icon that looks like a little Polaroid camera photo (its the 9th in from the right hand side) and uploading them from your computer - the screen will look like this

You just click on 'browse for files' and you can access your own computer files or phone or whatever you might use to find the picture you want.

You can turn a piece of text into a link by highlighting the text and then pressing the 'link' button and copying the web address of the link into it.

It will say your name ( or your sewing name) at the end of the post but not your e mail address or any other identification.

Even if you don't want to write a post to begin with, please do support your Bee friends by commenting on their post, it's really easy to do and makes them feel that they aren't just talking to themselves!

It's great to share with Bee friends when you start or finish a project ( better than a 'that's nice dear'!), and it's lovely for new people to get a feel of who we are and what we do before they come along for the first time.

Be brave and get posting!      debs x ( aka Black Magic Thomas....just in case you were wondering?!?)