In which I show some embroidery from a pattern found in the book “Zakka Embroidery” by Yumiko Higuchi, a baby quilt quilted in a walking foot pattern shared by Melissa Marginet (@melissamarginet on Instagram) for the #walkingfootquiltalong, and a baby quilt made with Churn Dash blocks using OG Cotton + Steel fabrics from the Garland line and quilted by a new friend Brandy who lives here in YYC.
crafting friends through video since 2009
TTMT - Talk To Me Tuesday 
Nice finishes! I love your Holiday Churn Dash. It’s super cute and festive feeling.
I have loved meeting Susan in person. Now we just need to get the rest of the North Carolina girls together. It’s good to have sewing peeps in persons. I join a guild just for that reason. None of my local friends sew. I need some crafty friends IRL. I hope you get together and have a sew day.
The baby quilt is sweet. A nice size for practicing quilting techniques on. I need make more small quilts for practice. I can always donate them later.
Good to see you again and Happy Crafting!
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Thanks! I’m really happy with the churn dash too… it’s kind of crazy and fun and I like that in a quilt.
I’ve looked into the modern quilt guild here, but they meet on a terrible day of the week for me (I get up at 2am the day after, so I’d be in bed before they meet for the night) and now they’ve started meeting half way across the city, making it even harder to get there. I’ve never found another guild I’ve thought I might like to join, which is too bad! I always wanted to at least check out a meeting or two, but maybe someday…
The baby quilt was a nice size to practice. The quilt along suggested using either 2.5″ squares or 5″ ones, so I went 5″ just to make it a more usable size (I do make wall-hangings for my mom, but they’re not really a thing I’d decorate with). I was surprised to enjoy quilting it – I’ve always kind of hated using a walking foot, but this went really easily.
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You are indeed a serious swapper!
I’ve watched your walkingfootalong progress on IG. Your quilt looks so good!
How completely awesome is it that you found someone quilty in your area to hang out with? I really hope you get to have a sew day. It’s such a cathartic thing to get to do!
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I always make the best things for swaps (and never finish anything that’s not for swaps, it seems!) and I need to get out of that habit… make a few nice things for myself instead 😀 What I like about swaps though is that it lets you do a small version of something new or different that you might not do otherwise and I do enjoy that.
Hopefully we manage to find time – she’s got kids so it’s not the easiest to work around their schedules and our work schedules as well. But we will see what happens. It was fun to hang out and chat with her.
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I LOVE the baby quilts. They’re gorgeous!
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Thanks! It was fun to work on!
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Great embroidery designs. What a sweet baby quilt. I didn’t know there were swaps and quilt-alongs on Instagram. I may need to stay away from that, since I tend to join things like that.
Giant churndash Christmas quilt? Wow! I have a top (not quilted0 of giant log cabins that I really like. What a beautiful one that made for you.
I hope you can work out a sew day. The thing I miss most about living at the farm in Minnesota was going to spend the day with my neighbor and just quilting all day with her. She has since moved to Colorado, and says she misses those days too. I remember one day when she was making the cutest baby quilt all in pastels and I was making a jack-o-lantern one in bright oranges, and it never occurred to us how different our styles were. So I hope you can get that worked out and enjoy it.
Great to see you.
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There are quite a lot of swaps on Instagram, but it’s kind of settled down from a few years ago. A lot of the people who run swaps now have way more rules than I’m all that interested in following (some of them charge people to join in order to encourage people not to crap out on the swap, many of them have really strict schedules where you have to post certain pictures at certain points and you get put on the black list if you screw things up and people on the black list are not allowed to join swaps). I get why it all happens the way it does – there’s a lot of takers in the world, who don’t like to give back – but it makes it less fun than it used to be. This one is a pretty easy going swap though, which made it feel more okay to join.
I bet your big log cabin quilt top is great… I love log cabins too! Another favourite traditional block.
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Love your Christmas quilt. Love the fabric and how big the churn dash is. The embroidery is beautiful!
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Thank you! I enjoyed making both!
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I love your giant churndash blocks. It’s fun to make a simple block huge.
Swapping is so much fun! I used to be a crazy swapper several years ago. Swapping was huge back when Flickr was the “In” place to hang out.
All my sewing buddies are online. I found a local quilt shop that has a Quilts of Valor group that I’m going to check out next month.
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I used to do swaps on Flickr too, back in the day! I just kind of moved my swapping over to Instagram now. It’s (almost) always fun 😀
I do think it’d be nice to have someone in person to sew with, since sewing is such a solitary activity, but it maybe won’t work out. We will see!
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The baby quilt is really cute! I have seen some amazing quilting done with jut a walking foot, and this one is right up at the top. Beautiful! Was it difficult or time consuming? Just curious. I have done quick ones using straight line quilting, but not anything intricate with the walking foot like this.
Oh my, the christmas churn dash is gorgeous! How nice to find someone local to sew with. We don’t really have sew days with Project Linus though we do meet every month. I tend to bring my crochet/knitting because it’s easier to travel with and easier to start/stop. I would love to have someone local to sew with, occasionally at least.
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This walking foot pattern was really easy – it basically used existing points on the quilt so you didn’t really have to mark anything. I think the corners took the longest, but you could kind of add as much as you wanted into the corners/borders to differentiate them from the rest of the quilt, so they didn’t have to be as complicated if you wanted it to go faster. It took part of two afternoons and I had it all done, which is much faster than standard for me!
The lady who ran the quilt along has a book of her walking foot patterns, which I bought, and it kind of makes me want to make a dozen quilts so I can try them all. (And I’ve always liked FMQ better than walking foot quilting, so that’s a little surprising for me!)
I do hope we manage to get together for some sewing – I think it could be fun. It’s so hard to coordinate schedules, though, isn’t it? She’s got two youngish daughters (10 and 13, I think), so she’s pretty busy with their activities and her job on weekdays. I guess we will see what happens!
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The baby quilt is adorable and the quilting on it is lovely! And the large churn dash is great as well. I hope you can get together again soon with your new friend. My cousin and I talk about having a sew day but haven’t been able to work out a time yet.
The embroidery is very sweet.
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Time is really the enemy, isn’t it? It can be so hard to coordinate times to get together with people. I have a much more open schedule than most people because I’m not married/don’t have kids, but then my work schedule makes things difficult. It’s always something!
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