Embroidery Classes

Did you know that I teach an Embroidery Classes the 3rd Wednesday of every month?  I do and I love it!  Embroidery was something I learned as a pre-teen.  My sisters and I were taught by our next door neighbor, Mrs. Langworthy.  I remember a group of the neighbor girls getting together at her house and her teaching us.  We were taught the basics and to this day I can't believe how lucky we were to have someone will to spend an evening every week with a group of pre-teen girls and teach us all how to stitch.

I have 2 classes, the first one is from 1:00-4:00 PM and in this class we are working on the Home Sweet Home An Embroidered Workbox by Carolyn Pearce.

Isn't it just darling?  Wait until you get a look at the next picture!

Each piece is tiny and because they re all so small they are really 'doable' in a short amount of time.  Some of the stitches are ones we've already learned but some of them are completely new and we are having a lot of fun learning them.

This is a picture of the back of the box!  The box is 6 5/16" x 6 1/8" x 3 7/8" finished!

Our evening class goes from 6:00-9:00 PM and in this class we are doing something completely different!  We are doing the same stitches (for the most part) as we are in the afternoon class but instead of putting them on the notions for the box we have taken Crabapple Hill Studio's pattern 

Susan's Dresden Garden

and we are doing each of the embroidered 'blades' with the stitches we are learning!  Talk about fun!  The threads we are using for this are Silks, Embroidery Floss, Pearl Cotton & Wool!  

Here we are learning how to color on fabric with Crayola Crayons and to Embroider!

Aren't they just so cute!!  Follow my Blog and sign up for my newsletter at Miss Marker's Quilts and receive this FREE pattern from Crabapple Hill Designs!!

Join me on the 3rd Wednesday of the month for Embroidery Class!

Happy Quilting!

Quilter's Take Manhattan!

Quilter’s Take Manhattan!

I was actually thinking they should have changed the name of the show from Quilter’s Take Manhattan to O’Susannah’s Takes Manhattan!  See all those people?  Well more than half of them were all from O’Susannah’s!  Sue took 2 buses loaded with Quilters to Manhattan and it was a blast! 

Now for the real eye candy!  The quilts!

Every type of quilt was there.  There were real modern quilts, landscape quilts and antique quilts.  Mark Dunn (Owner of Moda Fabrics) brought some quilts from his personal collection to share with us. 

And a very special quilt from his personal collection, the first quilt his son made for him!

A Jelly Roll Quilt!

Did you know that every year Moda features a reproduction quilt?  It’s called Quilts for a Cause.  Mr. Dunn brought quite a few of them, both the Antique Quilt and Moda’s modern day version of the quilt.   

Have  you seen the 2014 quilt yet?

Give us a call or send us an email, we've got the kits!  Kits normally cost $160.00, for a limited time our price is $140.00 (While supplies last)!  This quilt is honoring Libby Lehman.  

  

Here you can see The Antique quilt behind Mark’s son and he is holding Moda’s version of the quilt. 

Now you can see both a Antique and the reproduction next to each other.  The matching of the colors is amazing!

The following quilt (the Woman’s face) from a distance is pretty, very pretty but when you got up close to it an realized what it was, well it was simply stunning and truly pulled at your heart strings.

It was made up of thousands of pictures of women that had had Cancer.

           

And it was beautiful!

We had a wonderful time and EVERYONE was exhausted when it was time to go home!

If you plan to be in or around NYC September 2015, you should go!  Quilter’s Take Manhattan is put on by the Quilt Alliance (Alliance for American Quilts).  Here is a link Quilt Alliance page where you can get more information and sign up to the eNews. 

Happy Quilting Everyone!

NYC Buildings - Quilter's Eye Candy

NYC and FIT!a

Last September I was lucky enough to join a group of ladies for a bus trip to NYC!!  Whenever I tell anyone I’m from NY they always think I’m from ‘the’ city but I actually live about 5 house north west of NYC and haven’t been there in YEARS!   Anyhow, there was a group of women going from O’Susannah’s Quilts & Gifts in Watkins Glen NY and considering my sister is O’Susannah herself and my sister Jane and my sister-in-law Jeannie were also going I just HAD to go with them!  I had a ball!  

The entire reason for going was to attend Quilter’s Take Manhattan 2014.  It was a wonderful show, so wonderful that this post is going to be in two sections!  The first is going to be some eye candy of the building in NYC, talk about a quilter’s paradise!  I can’t tell you how wonderful it was to walk around the city and look at the buildings!

First up is a picture of Madison Square Garden.  Many of you may think that this is just a plain simple building but to me it was some real modern quilting, straight lines, blocks of all sizes, even the steps to me had a cool pattern!

When looking at this building I saw fabulous triangle fills!  The ore I looked at it I realized that the side ‘fern’ type design would work perfectly in a Dear Jane Quilt Border!

 

Take a look at that circular sashing fill!  I think it would be perfect; there is nothing directional about it so it would fill up the sashings perfectly.  Also did you notice something about the circles?  Yup, beautiful piano keys with an echo inside them.

Here are more piano keys for you along with a gorgeous wave!  I will be keeping this design in mind for the upcoming 2015 Row-by-Row quilt theme is water.  This pattern is also a great pattern for beginner free motion quilting.

Do you need an idea for a corner stone fill?  Love it!  I also really like the straight lines next to it.  They gave me ideas of echoing blocks especially the more modern quilt blocks.

This photo is filled with quilting ideas!  Start off with the first rope border, then the beads, then beautiful echo lines and finish it off with that wonderful fern with a flower in the center (upper right corner of the picture).  Do you see why I spent my entire walk looking up?  I wanted my machine to play!

Window headers make great circular designs!  Love the petals!  They would also be perfect for a Dresden Plate Quilt!

I really liked the very clean lines of this one, again a perfect quilting motif for sashings, add the echo of the sashing with the circles as a fill and you’ve got a great design!

I really didn’t think I’d see prairie points in NYC but I did!    The grapes and vines would be perfect on a quilt come this fall when the grapes are in season again.  Lots and lots of detail on this one!

Perfect edge-to-edge design!

A great block fill or a corner stone or an all over design!  I can see one row orientated this was and then the next row flipped, it would give multiple different designs and would also be beyond gorgeous on a whole cloth quilt!!! 

All of the shops windows were beautiful!  The wedding gowns were beyond beautiful!  I thought I should snap at least one photo of a store window just so you knew once in a while I stopped looking up! 

Happy Quilting!

Wool Batting

Have you wanted to see what custom quilting with wool batting does for one of your quilts but just didn’t want to spend a lot of money to see what all the buzzzzz is about?

Check out this small wall hanging that was custom quilted and wool (Quilter's Dream) was used for the batting.  Wool just seems to make the quilting and the quilt POP and it’s lightweight!

Not only does it make the quilting POP but take a look at these stars and how it makes the stars really spin.  To me, wool is the best of all worlds, it’s a natural fiber, it’s light-weight, it brings dimension to your quilt AND it’s warm and cuddly!

Next time you make a wall hanging or a table runner try using wool batting, I think you’ll love the way it looks!

Happy Quilting!

Happy Holidays!

I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas and were able to spend time with their families!  We were able to have two of our three children and their families home this year for Christmas.  Our third daughter (OB Nurse) had to work on Christmas day and live quite a distance from us.  She lives in Idaho with her husband and two children, they are both in the US Air Force so they were not able to come home.   

My Long Arm was humming for the last month trying to make certain that everyone got their quilts in time for Christmas.  I am actually surprised that I managed to get it all done but I did!  My projects on the other hand did not manage to get all done :(.  I had hoped to get a quilt quilted for my husband and I designed a Christmas Stocking for our Grandchildren that I wanted to get quilted and put together but again that didn't happen.  I figured I'm already getting started for Christmas next year!

I normally spend the week between Christmas and New Years cleaning out my sewing room and planning out my goals for the next year. By Christmas morning my sewing room looked like a bomb had exploded in it.  Seriously, you couldn't walk 2 steps in the room without having to step over something!  I did manage to get it back under control, my husband said that it deserved a 'before' and 'after' picture.  My next small project is to review my goals from last year and finish writing down my 2015 goals.  I have found that if I take the time to write my goals down, they actually happen.  I can't begin to explain how excited I am for 2015 and the changes that are coming to my sewing room and my Long Arm Studio, I promise to let you in on it soon!

I hope all is well with you and your families!

Happy Quilting!

Margaret

Southern Belle Conference

I feel like I've traveled all over the East Coast this last month!  I visited NYC a few weeks back for Quilter's Take Manhattan and had a wonderful time, saw some incredible quilts and met some wonderful people, more on this trip soon I promise!

Last week I spent 4 days in Atlanta Georgia attending the Southern Belle Statler Conference.  This was an intense 4 days of learning some pretty cool custom designs and how to use them on my Gammill Statler Long Arm.  The program was taught by Anita Shakleford and Joan (pronounced JoAn) Knight and was geared towards custom quilting and some of the new things my Gammill will do.  

While there I also met four quilting pattern designers in addition to seeing some of Anita’s new quilting designs.  The new designs ranged from the very traditional to extremely modern.  One of the designers, Joyce Lundrigan has designed a group of triangle patterns that are interchangeable!  Yes!  They are fantastic because if you don’t like the inside of one of the triangles you can just take it out and insert a different center design and all of these triangles can be used individually.  Here’s a snapshot of a couple of her patterns

This morning I finished up a quilt using some of these patterns and they were very easy to put together and stitched out wonderfully.  Want to see what they look like stitched out?

I needed a square and the triangles went together so easily I couldn't resist putting them together besides don't you love the new pattern it made?

 

I’m not certain how well you will be able to see the triangles, hopefully you can.  This table topper was made with Jo Morton’s new line called Melodies, yes, this is the same fabric I used as background fabric for the placemats.

Let me know if you would like to see some of the patterns the other designers brought to show off and I’d be happy to share them with you! 

Happy Quilting!

Margaret

Placemats with Candies

 Placemats with Candies

Recently I was watching a YouTube tutorial on Missouri Star Quilt Company on how to make a real simple ‘Zig Zag Table Runner’ by Kansas Troubles.  The complete Table Runner pattern and is available in their new book Layers of Love:

The runner was really cute and looked beyond simple but one problem, I didn't need a new table runner but I did need some new placemats!  I adapted what I saw them doing to make some new ones for my table!  What do you think?  Did I do good?

To make mine I used 4 – 5” WOF strips of Jo Morton’s new line of fabric Melodies by Jo Morton and for the 2 ½” squares I picked Laundry Basket Quilts Jelly Bean Candies by Moda.  You can watch my tutorial here:

Fabric Requirements

	4 Placemats	6 Placemats
Background 1	1/2 Yard	3/4 Yard
Background 2	1/2 Yard	3/4 Yard
Background 3	1/2 Yard	3/4 Yard
Background 4	1/2 Yard	1/2 Yard
Moda Candies	2	3
Backing Fabric	4 Fat Quarters	6 Fat Quarters
Batting	4 - 18" x 22"	6 - 18" x 22"
Bindings Strips  (inc)	8-2 ½” WOF	12-2 ½” WOF

Fabric I used:

Background Fabric I used Melodies by Jo Morton
	#1	Green Pinwheel Waves
	#2	Green Clematis Blooms
	#3	Green Feathering Leaves
	#4	Green Stripes
Candies
	Laundry Basket Quilts Jelly Bean by Moda

I also used “The Strip Stick” when pressing my seams open.  This is a pretty handy tool to help when pressing seams open or to one side because the iron concentrates on pressing where the seam is.  The Strip Stick is available in 3 sizes: Mini, 18” & 45”, I like the 45” one it’s great when pressing borders too!

Happy Quilting!