Life has been crazy hasn’t it? Before the Covid-19 pandemic and all the changes around the worldwide response to that, I started working a lot for my local quilt shop again last fall, helping them get their computers and data together for a new point-of-sale system. Between that and a sampler that I’m writing and my son graduating high school, I have not really found time to post any new content here. I apologize for that because I can see people are checking in and I’d like to keep y’all up to date!
Guys! I’m writing a whole sampler! It’s a big stretch for me and as always happens with my creative process, I go through stages of loving it, not loving it, just wanting it done, and being so excited that this HUGE project is something I can even do! It’s really just about complete – just need the testers to go through the setting instructions for me.
More fun still for me is that it’s the “Know Them, Raise Them, Be Them” sampler honoring 20 women throughout history to whom we can look for inspiration. I wrote condensed biographies of each woman (and got great proofreading and editing help from my husband and from a dear friend). I have to say that the research and thinking about each story was wonderfully reflective and educational for me. I hope it’s the same for many quilters.
Here’s my first flimsy of the quilt, photo taken on a hazy day:
And it’s getting quilted at The Quilt Shack at Lichy Woods. Her Facebook page is at https://www.facebook.com/quiltshacklichy if you want to follow along. She’s doing some very fun custom quilting for me.
The patterns have been published on Gruber’s Quilt Shop’s website over the last several months as many of you already know. We’ll have the whole package for sale there as soon as testers approve the final setting instructions!
Thanks for stopping by –
The center square plus the first row are looking pretty good in this one. Then my 10″ check starts showing that my seam allowance was getting too big by a thread or two (which was *weird* because in some patterns my scant 1/4″ is too narrow since I use a 1/4″ blade foot for my Pfaff and then can adjust my needle to make it even a bit more scant):
I did do some unsewing on the blocks a couple of times.
Whereas by the time I had my blocks together, I had a fairly hairy back! 
Some fabrics are just this way, but also a couple of spots are due to my masking tape hitting the edge. This really isn’t *too* bad (Not like wovens, I love wovens/homespun but talk about fray potential!) but I did try to trim and clean up most of this before giving the flimsy (top) to a long-arm quilter to baste and do some preliminary stitching for me before I do some handquilting. If it really bugs you, you could use some Fray Check on your edges and/or zig-zag baste or serge your edges.
materiella.com 