Look what I finished up last night! The quilt top that is, not the baby – he/she still has a couple of months to go, which is a good thing, because I am so unprepared for baby day and Christmas falling on the same month, not helped of course by having a six week window in which Hercules could arrive. The top isn’t officially finished yet, there is still a little appliqué to go, but I know that’s going to [...]

Jodie of Vintage Ric Rac posted this very useful tutorial on how she makes her circles so neat. All it takes is a little extra fabric, and it definitely saves all the hassle of needle turn. This is also the same method I use to turn the inside of any appliqued letters, I love the neat edges it gives. See the full tutorial here.

Crystal of Little Bit Funky posted this fabulous “quilt” tutorial over the weekend, with just a little bit of batting and some squares of fabric you can turn a shop bought comforter into your own personalised, very easy to make, quilt. This is great for an instant gratification project, it can be finished in a couple of hours and is perfect for beginner sewers looking to branch out into quilting. If you have the time (and inclination!) you could even [...]

Backdated post to make up for how slack I’ve been, sorry to anyone on the RSS feed! I’m all about quilts this week. This is Emma, I’ve always been terrible at naming my quilts so I figured I need to come up with a standard system for them, I figure each one of them is almost like a child to me, so I wanted to give them proper names and then developed a way to select the names. I explained [...]

I quilted and bound Connor’s red string quilt a few days ago. Echo stitching around the block seams the same as his brother’s version and bound in the same fabric. I ended up using some flannelette from my stash, a bright blue with skulls and crossbones on it. The flannelette I backed it with wasn’t pre-washed and shrunk more than I had intended, making it really crinkley on the front. I don’t mind though, this quilt is going to get [...]

1. It’s very pink, 2. Pink Strings top, 3. string, 4. Spiderweb trial block 1 for my month of Spiderweb Bee, 5. String Quilt Pillow, 6. Spider Web Quilt in Progress, 7. “a little help from my friends” top completed, 8. colorful string quilt, 9. black white + green string baby quilt front, 10. string pieced quilt, 11. Watercolors 1 (WIP), 12. First quilt, 13. IMG_5592 I finished up Connor’s quilt this afternoon during his nap, but bed is calling [...]

Remember my string block tutorial*? I started that quilt in may of 2008, Declan was just over a year old and I had barely finished the top when he swiped it off me, dubbed it “The Patchwork Blanket” and never gave it back. That poor quilt top has been abused beyond measure since then. It gets dragged around the house, drinks have been spilled on it, it even got dragged through the mud at a picnic about six  months ago. [...]

In the last few weeks of pregnancy I finally decided to a theme for the cot set I planned on making for our third babe. Black and white prints from Northcott mixed in with tone on tone blue and orange prints if it was a boy, and a tiny pink leopard print if I ended up delivering a girl. I had both options laid out on my sewing desk, ready for me to get stuck into when I returned from [...]

So far you will have completed Step One – Cutting. Step Two covers the construction of the off centre/wonky logcabin blocks. This is probably the most sewing intensive step of the week, from start to finish it took me about five hours to make 30 blocks, so you’ll want to set aside a good portion of the day, or split it over two sessions. Log Cabin Block Tutorial The Log Cabin block is one of the easiest blocks to make, [...]

I’m kicking myself for not thinking of this before Christmas as a gift for my crafty Mum, it’s so easy, took about half an hour to whip up and the finished result is awesome. So if you need a place to keep stray needles and have a few selvedges laying around, read on! Apologies in advance for the poor quality of the photos, NSW has been drenched in rain since boxing day so finding any kind of natural light was [...]