Welcome
Welcome to my online sewing journal! I started sewing when I was 8 years old; my mom, grandmother and aunts all had a hand in teaching me. I went to a Catholic school and wore a uniform, Friday was our free dress day – 90% of the time I wore something I’d made. I made my prom dress, wedding dress, and all other outfits for special occasion between the ages of 15 thru 25. We had water damage in our home and lost pictures and the items I’d made and saved.
I am the mother to 3 wonderful young adults ages 27-31. While they were small I made most of their cloths. Once my daughter entered junior high school she didn’t want to wear dresses anymore only sweats and tshirts — Imagine that!!
I was shopping at JoAnn Fabric Shop in 2004 looking for supplies to alter a prom dress for my girlfriend’s daughter and stumbled on a machine embroidery demo. OMG I was hooked — and as they say the rest is history.
I bought my first Viking embroidery machine that same day and started stitching for the church, the high school anybody that wanted something personalized I figured out how to do it — I had to pay for that machine!!! Eleven years later I still have that first machine plus 5 more! I now have a shop on Etsy and my own website. I make personalized baby gift items — what’s the saying when you are doing something you love you never work a day in your life — well that’s how I feel!!
I have always admired quilts but never thought I’d ever want to make one myself. I remember my grandmother and aunts getting together to hand quilt thinking that wasn’t for me. I’m 55 years old and I’ve gotten the “quilt bug” and want to share my journey with you!
Once I decided to try making a quilt my first thoughts were how can I use my embroidery machine to make it happen. I found several sites but fell in love with Chantelle’s Creations. Her site offers many options and the prices are reasonable. I pulled out my “wish list” folder to see if any of her designs could be used. She offers a square in a diamond quilt block and I knew with proper placement of fabric a star forms as a secondary shape.
The process using the embroidery machine is relatively simple – kinda time consuming but the results are very accurate. Basically you hoop a piece of stabilizer the machine stitches an outline for batting placement. Once you trim the batting the machine stitches additional outlines for fabric placement. The technique is simply stitch n flip. The embroidery machine does the quilting also — win win right?!! Once each block was completed I trimmed the seam allowance to a quarter inch, arranged in a 9 patch format to stitch together. In this example I tried a self binding technique.
The wall hanging measures 24×24 inches. fabric used are from Denyse Schmidt. I loved how it turned out! Hopefully in the picture you can see the quilting lines inside of the diamonds, there is stippling also on each block.
Not bad for a first attempt — until next time — live love and sew!!
Posted in Around The House, Fabric, New Projects, Uncategorized and tagged diamond in square, machine embroidery, quilted wall hanging, quilting | Leave a comment
