It's A Cynch!

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 place your fir

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 favorite pictures.  One box had all of his AKC ribbons for agility in

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 liked.  It took a while to embr