It's A Cynch!

2018 Recap Hey guys!  I'm back!  I know I haven't posted a lot this past year.  But it's been an exciting, hectic few years for us as a family.  I've made several quilts that I'm going to blast through.  As I get older, times flies by so fast!  Not a joke.  So all of you youngsters out there, enjoy each day and don't take it for granted! 1.  The most exciting event is m y youngest son got married to a very sweet young lady, Lily.  Their picture is below.  It was the most beautiful, calm, full of love wedding that I've been to.  We had only close family and a few friends.  Aren't they gorgeous! 2.  My husband and I traveled to Italy for two weeks to see my sister and brother in law.  We had a fabulous time!  Italy is beautiful and overwhelmingly full of history! These are some of the best pictures that we took.  Our favorite city to visit was Florence, Italy by far.  We enjoyed walking and roa...

Okay, it might not be a perfect masterpiece. But I thought for my first ribbon quilt it turned out very nice. The important thing is that my friend Cathie who I made it for absolutely loved it! I used a star pattern to stitch in the ditch and it came out really nice on the black backing fabric. Check it out below! I think it's beautiful.

I made my first paper pieced block! I pulled it from the Carol Doak website. She has a lot of free patterns on her website.  You guys should check it out because some of the patterns are pretty neat. It's just www.caroldoak.com. I have been wanting to try paper piecing for a long time, but have been scared to try it . I found this pattern on the Carol Doak website because it was labeled Paper Piecing for Beginners. That's me! It was not as hard as I thought, but you have to pay attention to how you place the fabric before you sew it to make sure it's going to cover the entire space correctly. The picture above shows the paper with the lines that you sew on. The middle picture is how the finished block looks before you trim it.  Do not tear the paper off until after you trim the block to the proper size using the paper as your  template .  The third picture is the completed block  after  it's been trimmed to the proper size . The easiest thing to do is to p...

We all love our kids and want to keep those old baby clothes.  I've made a couple of memory quilts with old kids clothes.  I need to post pictures of the last one I did because I made a huge boo boo.  But my quick thinking husband helped me figure a fix.  That's not what I want to write about now.  I want to write about our pets.  Our other kids that we love.  The ones that don't talk back and actually listen to you. A good friend of mine lost her beloved dog.  He was a great dog and she took him to a lot of shows.  He was her baby.  So she was very, very sad when he passed.  She asked me to make a ribbon quilt out of his old show ribbons. Ribbon quilt?!  What is that?!  I have never heard of that before.  And I've been quilting a LONG time!  So I Pinterest-ed (is that a word???  It is now.) it.  And there are beautiful ribbon quilts out there. She gave me three boxes of ribbons and a few of her f...

I've told you before that my Babylock Unity embroiders also.  I bought the digitizing software a few years ago that goes with the Babylock called the Palette.  I think I have version 10.  I use it to digitize designs...well, ok..I'm learning still.  Digitizing is not easy!  I figured that since I'm a mechanical engineer and I work on CAD software all day, digitizing would be a breeze.  Well, it's not!  There are a lot of little tricks and order matters.  I played around with the picture aspect of the Palette.  Supposedly, you can scan in any picture, tell Palette that you want to digitize it and voila! You have a digitize picture that you can then embroider.  So I used one of my youngest son's senior pictures.  Isn't he handsome?  I had to crop his face or the file would have been huge! It took a few tries and I had to adjust the number of threads, the contrast and brightness a few times before I got an image that I l...

I know.  I know.  I haven't posted in a while.  I've been extremely busy and I haven't had the time.  But I wanted to share with you a little project that I made this weekend.  It took longer than I thought and my sewing machine didn't like to cooperate.  But I finished it and it's really cute...more importantly, useful! I decided I needed a basket to keep all of my receipts till I file them.  So I used clothesline rope and wrapped scrap fabric around it and made a basket.  It's called a coiled fabric basket.  There are several blogs and help online.  The only tip I can suggest is to sew along the rope with a straight stitch to attach the fabric to the rope and it kind of flattens the rope, making it easier to sew.  I used the largest zigzag stitch and a heavy blue jean needle.  Don't forget the large blue jean needle. Or you will break needles.  Trust me...I speak from experience!  I even asked my husband to bring ...