Thursday, December 19, 2013

In Memory of Granny


As I was writing the previous post earlier this evening my husband and I left to go visit his Granny who had been transferred from the hospital to a hospice house. She passed while we were there visting. So I am dedicating this post to the wonderful woman who raised my husband. Below is the quilt top of the first jelly roll race quilt that I made. It was for Granny's 96th Birthday a few months ago, wish I had gotten a photo of her with it.  We are sad to see her go but glad that she is no longer in pain.
We love you Granny


Quilty Cousin comes for a visit

Yay! My one and only relative who quilts came to visit me last weekend.  She lives a few hours away so we don't get to see each other very often. 
Of course we had to go visit my favorite LQS and while there she mentioned that she had not yet made a complete quilt as she has been learning through her guild by making sampler blocks. 
I thought "well, we are gonna have to fix this" and asked her if she would like to go home from her visit with a completed quilt.  Of course the answer was YES! so we picked out a jelly roll and backing and binding fabrics with the idea of completing a jelly roll race quilt before she went home the next day.
Well.... We almost did it lol.  We had some other family over for dinner and ended up visting for several hours and didn't get to the sewing until around 9pm.  She had the top pieced and a border added before we gave in for the night at 3am. After going out for breakfast and more visting we went back to my house and got the quilt sandwich basted (with elmer's glue of course).
She wanted to try free motion quilting so I made a practice sandwich for her to work on.  We were having so much fun trying freemotion and chatting that time got away from us. It was time for her to go home.  So after a quick lesson on binding and writing a list of some great online tutorials and videos to reference if she got stuck she headed home.
Here is her quilt top...great job Dom!

Monday, December 2, 2013

Custom Acrylic Shapes

I still haven't had a chance to play with these yet, but I am excited to get them in the mail to Cindy@SewMeSerenity, she was the winner of my first ever (hopefully of many) giveaway during the twitter Black Friday Sew In. 
I have a new set ordered and on their way. They should be in by the middle of next week, just in time to make a whole lotta half-square-triangles for a quilt that I hope to have done in time for Christmas.




I was looking for quilting rulers in various sizes to use when trimming half-square-triangles or fussy cutting without having to repeatedly move and re-align my ruler. As far as I can tell, they don't make or sell them in any and every size. Lets face it, I will be the first to tell you that I am lazy and want to find the easiest or most efficient way to get things done, so I was determined to find a way.

That is when I came across the Delvies Plastics website.

You can get different thicknesses and are able to custom order pretty much any shape or size.
Since they aren't actual rulers I custom ordered them with the lines engraved to help with centering blocks/designs. You can get them quite inexpensively if you can manage without the engraved lines, but hey, I'm going for easy.  Even with the engraving I think that the price was very reasonable.
I ordered 2", 3", 4", 5", 5 1/2" and 6", all 1/8" thick it was $30 including shipping (so the cost may differ a bit depending on shipping rates), for 6 faux rulers I think that is a very fair price.  You can get the laser cut shapes up to 17" or 17 1/2" (I can't quite remember what she said on the phone).

The only issue I foresee with these at this point is that like most rulers they are smooth on the back and will probably slip around. Maybe it's just me, but I have this problem with every on eof my rulers, even the ones that are supposed to be no-slip. So I am going to give mine the treatment that I give to all of my rulers, a quick shot of spray adhesive on the back.  I just give them a light spray and let them dry before using.  This is the only method that has worked for me so far.  I have tried the grippers and the stickers and the vinyl sheets to no avail.

Again, they have many shapes and sizes standard and with the cutomizable options you can let your imagination run wild creating templates.  My experience with them has been good.  Customer service has been responsive both by email and on the phone.  So, go check them out.