This is how I get to work.

Sometimes, when I can tear myself away from all your blogs and swearing at how hard it is to comment with my iPhone, I might do some hand sewing. I took this picture admiring three flatty flat flat hexagons that I had just sewn together.

I then proceeded to document how I sew them together using a ladder stitch, which has always served me well with applique and other areas requiring an invisible stitch. I had to wait for the bus to stop to get clear pictures. Click on the pictures if you ...

Here are the straggling hexagon critters, lovingly rescued by Megan and delivered to me along with some gift hexies of her own! Thank you Megan!


All this stuff was embroidered without a pattern, as I went. I think that's pretty apparent when you look at this sheep. Ugh. What's wrong with it? Something terrible.


I have so many more of these little guys I want to make. A fish, elephant, crab, etc. If you make any of these critters yourself please let me know, I'd love to see them!

This is my block to inspire my bee mates in "Sew Scrappy Sew Happy" for July - my month! My inspiration is the forest, with little bits of sky and sunlight peeping through. Improvised log cabins are so freeing. Making a block feels like making a little masterpiece. I really do ponder each scrap. Just imagine Winnie the Poo poking his head and muttering "think, think, think".

This quilt was the answer to two equally important questions. What do I do with this bird fabric from Ikea?  And, why is my stack of green fabrics so much taller than all my ...

Once upon a time I was pregnant. That was a billion years ago. Or two. I forget. Anyway, I went to the Northwest Quilting Expo, and bought two charm packs of different fabric lines. I have no idea why I did this. Let's blame the pregnancy. Because in truth, quilts made straight from designer charm packs bore me. I am not trying to be mean or judgy. I just want more creative input with my projects; choosing, cutting, etc. So. I wondered what to do with my bizarre purchase.


Step 1: pulled out the fabrics that I liked, unloaded ...

Thanks for all the sweet comments about the hexagon critters! It's been so fun seeing that other people are excited about them like I am.  In other news, I joined a flickr quilting bee group. The name of the group is "Sew Scrappy Sew Happy". How could I not?

Here is the block I made for the first month. The next month is mine! The regretting might start some time after that. A whole year is a long time to stay on top of things, but I think I am up for the challenge.

My favorite sewing is sewing that doesn't involve hemming. Oh yeah, or patterns. I hate those things.


Sewing old tee shirts into new things fits the bill nicely.


I wrestled my daughter into this as soon as it was done and she immediately tried to pull it back over her head. "Ah! Ah!" She cried, telling me to take it off.


Apparantly I had not left enough arm room. But a quick trip to the sewing room and problem solved.


This is the only process pic I took but you can pretty much figure it out from this one ...

These little guys debuted tonight at the Portland Modern Quilt Guild meeting, where they were inadvertently left, along with some of their pals who I haven't even gotten to photograph yet! I'll post again when they make their way home.

These were the end result of asking myself, in my instant-gratification-all-the-time sort of way, "what could I do with just one hexagon?"


After toying with the idea a while I realized it was very similar in approach to a book by Ed Emberley about making thumbprint drawings that I had as a child. Oh just looking at that ...

I recently pawed through all my scraps and relegated them to separate bins by color.

I figure this will help me make more crumb blocks.

I had to combine yellow with off white, orange with brown, and purple with pink, because there's a lot of overlap in those colors. Black and white are together as well.

Part of me wonders if this is too much organization. But the truth is, when I go into my scrap bin, it's usually for a particular color. So why not have scraps already sorted by color?

I've taught four people to free motion quilt so far. Three of them took it and ran with it and I love seeing their quilting, I think it's better than mine. The fourth was my grandma and she decided she would rather just let someone else quilt her quilts so she could focus on the part she likes best: piecing. Can't argue with that.

I originally learned to free motion quilt from Kathy Sandbach, who has a book about free motion quilting ...

This is the first quilt I've completed in over a year and a half! The baby it was made for is nine months old. Whatever. I feel like a million bucks for having it completed. This is another group quilt by our collective of intrepid quilters. Prior quilts are here, here and here. Like the other quilts, a theme was chosen: numbers. Each quilter chose a number to represent. Blocks were delivered to me along with scraps of the fabric used. I divided the scraps into four color groups to construct the borders. Prior coverage of the quilting in ...

I am thinking abstract design for this quilt. Here are a couple thumbnail sketches I've made.

I worked with the idea of "union" in each of these designs. I think the last is my favorite. A nod to the "double wedding ring" design but modern and huge. Huge is my new interest.

Exhibit A: Flickr app for iPhone. Thousands of quilt pictures whenever I want!


Exhibit B: camera phone. Taking pictures of works in progress allows me to remember where I was months later when I pick them back up. Also helps me keep things straight as I sew, without continually having to lay things back out. Less up and down from the machine.

Exhibit C: Sketchbook Express iPhone app. Allows me to sketch ideas as I have them. Whenever they strike!

It was a long wet spring here in Oregon but finally finally the sun is shining, and flowers are exploding into bloom. Look at what I picked from our own garden!

And with the heat came an excuse to try that elderflower syrup. I use four tablespoons syrup, some ice and club soda. Mmmmmm. I will be making this again next year. I might increase the amount of sugar, and, as Sandra suggested, I may boil the syrup again afterward, to give it a longer shelf life. What a delicious reason to be using those coasters.

Hey! Less than a month ago I bought some fabric and now it's been turned into coasters. In mom time that's practically instantaneous.

Our previous coasters were relegated somewhere high up about a year ago. It will be so nice to have somewhere to set our glasses besides stray envelopes and magazines. I like the feeling of following through on my ideas, even when they're small.

Aw. That's sweet. This happened four years ago. Four years? Wow. A few days before the wedding I got a Great Idea. I would make a wedding quilt. Every guest at the ceremony would take a piece of fabric and make a prayer or wish or blessing for us and I would use the fabrics to make a quilt.

It was a sweet part of the ceremony. It was also like a hundred degrees out, and these puppies doubled as handkerchiefs for sweaty guests. Half of our friends watched my dad mop his brow with his and told us ...

I cut some shapes out of felt and let the little one stick them on this scrap of batting. It was fun for about 5 minutes. I think her dad played with it more than she did! I'm leaving the batting up, we'll see if it takes.

Have you heard of crumb piecing? Taking those teeny little pieces of fabric you just can't throw away and piecing them together at random to create blocks? The quilt above has crumb pieced blocks. I like it well enough, probably because of the limited palette of colors. Sometimes when scraps from far and wide are included, crumb blocks can get downright wild, a bit much for me and my style of quilting.

 Here is what I am working on; sewing together crumbs grouped by color. They have all the fun of improvisational piecing but a little more controlled. I ...

I was inspired by this stack of my husband's Wired magazines. The spines look like patchwork!

Looks like someone has a quilt almost done, doesn't it?

Then it would have been the perfect time to have completed this onesie! I think dandelions are so pretty. Probably because I don't take care of the yard.


I machine sewed the muslin dandelion heads with a raw edge and embroidered the seeds a year ago but only just got those stems embroidered this week (thinking of my friend Laura, embroidery muse, the whole time). A sweet little finish too late to fit my little one. So, breeders, next one with a girl is probably getting this.

I consider it no minor achievement that I have altered a couple shirts and my husband actually wears them. To work. In public. Something that I stitched. I know, you're speechless.

I probably have it easier than a lot of sewists in the "my guy won't wear stuff I make" category. Here's a guy who likes to go to Burning Man and always wants things that are a little "different", things with an edge. But not a girly edge. And not too different. Trying to strike that balance sometimes paralyzes me. Sorry for all the rumpliness. One ...