Uncategorized478 Videos

Don’t use those scissors!

Tomorrow my husband and I will celebrate our sixth wedding anniversary. We’ve been together for nearly eight years when you include our dating and engagement, and I’ve been a quilter for the majority of that time. Which means for the better part of a decade, he has been receiving proper scissor usage education. I really […]

Making snowballs in a heat wave

Last week the temperature was in the 90s all week where I live in the Midwest. It was the kind of week where you’d take two showers a day and still need another if you walked outside to grab the mail. So I stayed inside, crossed my fingers that the A/C would do its job […]

Stunning Christmas tree skirt in batiks

I LOVE batiks. I can’t get enough of them. So I was in heaven when the benefactor for the Mississippi Valley Quilt Guild suggested buying fabric from SewBatik.com to make Judy Niemeyer’s Christmas Celebration Tree Skirt. The benefactor business, Quilting By-You in Bettendorf, Iowa, is purchasing the fabric and donating the quilting for the tree […]

Book Review: Creating Celebration Quilts

Celebration quilts, better known as memory quilts, are meant to commemorate those special moments or people in our lives. Whether you’re remembering a loved one by creating a quilt from their clothing, turning all those race T-shirts into a quilt for the runner in your life or planning a quilt for the baby on the […]

Pinwheel quilted dog bed

Since we’ve moved to our new home, the dogs haven’t appreciated the wood floor in the bedroom so I made them a quilted dog bed so they’d have something soft to sleep on. I used a charm pack to create pinwheels, sewed a pillow case back and stuffed it with a waterproof dog bed liner […]

Pretty in Pink

For me, having a little girl means branching out in my sewing projects to garments. I’m just a big sucker for all the frilly little dress patterns, so Easter was a chance for me to have some fun creating a custom outfit for Angela. I started with a fuchsia eyelet dress made from McCalls M6015 […]

I landed another teaching gig

My class at CommUniversity, lead to another teaching position at Neal’s Vacuum and Sewing Center in Muscatine, Iowa. It all happened when I brought my machine there for an emergency cleaning. I’m paraphrasing a little, but the conversation went a little like this… “I know you’re backed up with sewing machines, but how quickly do […]