Tag Archives: die cuts

Patchy Hearts by Linda

I got an email yesterday with this beautiful quilt picture attached. Linda won the hearts giveaway last year, and this is what she did with the fusible hearts. I absolutely love the pastels and bright colors mixed together. This is Linda’s quilt design (she designed it in EQ). The hearts have sashing on two sides and the alternating blocks are half log cabin blocks. This is wonderful.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThis is the label she made. I love using the applique for the label.

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Thanks for stopping by. I hope you enjoyed your visit. Come again soon.

Marjorie

 

Stitch Detail

I promised on Monday to show you the stitch detail for the houses. Things turned a little upside down just after I posted that. My husband developed appendicitis and immediately after I posted, he told me we had to go to the doctor right away. We got back home yesterday after a successful surgery and two and a half days in the hospital. Hopefully, things will get back to whatever ‘normal’ actually is.

Now, for the stitch detail. I am always on a quest for an applique stitch that will hold a raw edge fusible applique in place securely enough to be washed over and over (functional quilts are a necessity at our house), that is complementary to the particular applique design, and that is at least a little bit unique. You will see that the blanket applique stitch here has a short leg and a long leg. The purpose was to make it look more like a hand stitched applique edge. The second stitch is meant to look like a free motion machine applique. And these stitches are much lighter than a satin stitch.

house003a_stitch detail001

I absolutely love satin stitch, but find that quilts with  a satin stitch applique will sometimes have a “waffle” edge on the applique after washing. The reason for this is the density of the stitching and the difference in density between the satin stitch, the applique and the background fabric. After washing and drying, the waffle edge is easily smoothed with a steam pressing from the back (yes, I do steam my quilts when needed), but it’s nice to have lots of other stitches in the repertoire for applique.

  
 

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you enjoyed your visit. Come again soon.

Marjorie

 

Big Little Book Blog Tour Recap: Tutorial Links and Winners

This has definitely been a non-productive week of stitching for me. I am fighting a cold and cough right now, but even before that, it seemed everything I stitched was just not quite right. On Wednesday, I finally stopped, shut off the machines and went downstairs to do family things. Sometimes if you just get away from it all, things work out better when you return. Thursday was better, but I didn’t get in my groove until Friday–and then there were errands to run which took me away from stitching. And today my cough and cold are bad enough that I think I’ll just veg awhile.

But I want to give you the final set of links to the Big Little Book of Die Cutting Tips Blog Tour tutorials as well as let you know that I did draw a winner immediately after the tour. Marilyn Lewis was the winner for my day of the tour and her book was shipped to her on November 16. And now, here are the direct links to the tutorials:

 
 

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you enjoyed your visit. Come again soon.

Marjorie

 

Crazy Hearts

Just wanted to show you some pictures of the crazy hearts quilt that I’m quilting this week. My friend, Sherry pieced this from a set of embroidery hearts I gave her. The hearts are made from crumb blocks and are cut with my AccuQuilt GO™ hearts die like this. They are cut from fabric that is randomly pieced together from scraps.

 

And then they are stitched onto background fabric with the basic hearts machine embroidery set.

And this is the way I’m quilting these. I am using this quilt to practice the swirls that I plan to use on Sherry’s bargello quilt.

 

 
 

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you enjoyed your visit. Come again soon.

Marjorie

 

Day 5 Machine Embroidery Blog Hop – Two Fun Projects

Sat morning 11:20 EST – Yay – Cherry’s post has come back from the cybergremlins. Thanks for stopping by.

It’s Friday and there are two really fun projects that I think you’re going to love. Stop in at Cherry Blossom Quilting Studio and Cheeky Cognoscenti’s blogs and enjoy! It’s almost Christmas – so get your gift list out because you can certainly start marking names off the list with these great ideas.

And a little surprise: I am so excited because AccuQuilt is now carrying my machine embroidery designs on their website. Just this morning, there are six designs for the AccuQuilt GO!™ that are now available through AccuQuilt. AccuQuilt and I have been talking and working on this for a very long time, and this is a nice Christmas gift for me to have this come to fruition. I will still maintain my own embroidery shop that has all of my designs, but will also offer as many as possible on the AccuQuilt website. 
 

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you enjoyed your visit. Come again soon.

Marjorie

 

Day 3 Machine Embroidery Blog Hop – Fall Medley

Today is Day 3 (and the day after the election) of the ME blog hop and SewCalGal has some great machine embroidery fun for you.

In addition, I’d like to share a couple of links to encourage all quilters to donate quilts to victims of the Hurricane Sandy disaster in the northeast. You can be sure that both of these organizations will deliver. Here are the links:

and

http://www.equilter.com/cgi-bin/webc.cgi/quiltrelief.html

 
 

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you enjoyed your visit. Come again soon.

Marjorie

 

Day 2 Machine Embroidery Blog Hop

I am just blown away with the creative ideas that Trish at All Things Crafty has for using the Sue and Sam machine embroidery sets. I can’t wait to try her ideas, and I won’t have to wait long because today is a teacher workday and my grandchildren will be visiting, What fun!

  
 

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you enjoyed your visit. Come again soon.

Marjorie

 

Big Little Book of Fabric Die Cutting – Blog Book Tour

Today is my day – and I am very excited to share my favorite chapter in the Big Little Book of Fabric Die Cutting with you. Ebony came up with the most clever system I have ever seen for writing pattern instructions for quilters. And this system will work not only with die cutting systems but also for rotary cutting. I am so excited about it that I actually created a video to explain how this works.

And before long, I want to create a video that shows you how cool the EDeN system is for writing cutting instructions in EQ7.

The whole Big Little Book of Fabric Die Cutting is jam packed with information about die cutting, so be sure to get your copy of it. Here’s the video I created.

And there’s lots more places to visit this week and next to find out about this great new book on die cutting:
October 16th – Ebony Love, LoveBug Studios
October 17th – Jennifer Rodriguez, All Things Belle
October 18th – Marjorie Busby, Marjorie’s Quilting Bee
October 19th – Michelle Marr, Michelle’s Romantic Tangle
October 20th – Tammy Tutterow, Sizzix Blog
October 21st – Patsy Thompson, Patsy Thompson Designs
October 22nd – Tracy Rampling, The Peony Teacup
October 23rd – Mary Fons, Hey Quilty!
October 24th – Barb Gaddy, Bejeweled Quilts
October 25th – Katrina Chapman Kahn, Sunshower Quilts
October 26th – SewCal Gal, Insights from SewCalGal
October 27th – Vanessa Wilson, The Crafty Gemini
October 28th – Kelly Jackson, I Have a Notion
October 29th – Connie Campbell, Freemotion By the River
October 30th – Gene Black, An Alabama Quilter
October 31st – Ebony Love, LoveBug Studios
November 1st – Book Launch on Amazon! (but you can pre-order anytime)
GIVEAWAY ALERT!
Leave a comment here before October 31 and you will be eligible to win a free copy of The Big Little Book of Fabric Die Cutting Tips. 
 
 

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you enjoyed your visit. Come again soon.

Marjorie

 

Variegating a Quilt

I am back to the Half Square Triangle quilt. All of the triangles have been stitched. This morning I sorted all the triangles and put them in order with color transitions that seem to work from one print to the next. They could be ordered differently, but this is the order I have them.

The next step is to decide how many pieces are in each variegation. Because the fabrics were chosen randomly, there are not equal numbers of squares in each stack. Thus, I expect to use 4-8 squares of a color in each variegation.

Hopefully this afternoon, I can start putting the squares up on the design wall and will take a pix and show you how it looks. This is a real shot in the dark – we may not like it when it is actually up on the wall.

Here’s the original quilt design – if you need a refresher. The colors in this EQ7 version are random scrappy.

 
 

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you enjoyed your visit. Come again soon.

Marjorie

 

ITH Mug Rug Tutorial

Mug rugs have become a fun and expressive outlet for quilters’ creativity. For me, they’re also a great way to practice free motion quilting, and they make wonderful gifts. So when I saw some mug rugs for embroidery machines that were done “in-the-hoop”, it piqued my interest. However, after seeing that the finished edge was a satin stitch, I was less interested because it would mean using a water soluble stabilizer or having a trace of tear-away stabilizer showing on the edge of my satin stitch. Either way, it would look fine after washing a couple of times, but my preference is a finished seam edge on mug rugs and on placemats. And then I had a flash of inspiration and realized that it could be done. And now I want to share it with you.

After working for awhile on a square mug rug, I decided that I needed more space for the designs. Taking into consideration the balancing act in design between the most popular hoop sizes of 5″ x 7″ or 6″ x 8″ and spacing for the embroidery design, I ended up using a hoop size of 6″ x 8″ or 150 x 200 mm.

And for those without embroidery machines or without a larger hoop for their machines, one can simply embroider or piece or hand stitch a design and then use the instructions in this tutorial to stitch the mug rug seam on their sewing machine. Either way, it makes a great mug rug and is the perfect way to show off your free motion quilting designs.

Click HERE for the tutorial. I made it into an adobe pdf file rather than putting all the text and photos into this post.

See what cute mug rugs these are. And they’re made with the Accuquilt circle die and some cutouts:

Come back tomorrow  for an embroidery design giveaway–one design as a mug rug and the same design without the mug rug! 
 

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you enjoyed your visit. Come again soon.

Marjorie