I want a really big pile of Mary Rose fabric. NOW. I have four quilts waiting in the wings, but I want THIS fabric NOW.
But I’m too sensible to buy it.
Poo on sensibleness.
WhyNot: I have three of those waiting to be quilted. I find that they’re a GREAT outlet for my patchwork fixation. It means that when I get a really great idea, I don’t have to make a bed-size quilt–just a little 30x30 one–and then I’ve gotten it out of my system. What a relief!
lynn- What, no Wal Mart near you? Can’t tell you how many times I’ve run out at one in the morning due to a fabric crisis.
Oh, sure, you have to hunt someone down, and pray that they know how to even cut fabric, (Though if you get someone young, they’ll let you cut it, and they’ll print out the slip for you.)
Though you better get fabric from there fast, as of March, a lot of them are pretty much eliminating the fabric dept. (Yarn, and other assort. crafts) to make room for electronics. And the new dept name after its been cut will be something like a “Celebrations” or some other crap. Like we need more wedding supplies…
BTW- I currently have a 12by 14 room that is dedicated to the crafts. Polymer clay, fabric, scrapbooking, I’m a crafter of all trades. I still find myself sewing at the kitchen table because of lack of room. I tell the hubster the lights better in there. I have a paper and fabric addiction. The women at JoAnn’s know me by name and current project.
Yay! The little 'uns thank you. I don’t know thing one about quilting, so I make 'em with two pieces of fabric (one really dark for the babyside and one nursery themed for the nurseryside) with a layer of batting in between. Then when the rectangle’s sewn together and turned right-side out, I stitch through all the layers in parallel and then perpendicular rows to make quilty-looking lines. I dunno, is that quilting? It’s certainly not fiddly patchwork! But it keeps everything from sliding around and losing shape when it’s washed.
Go up to your hubby and rip his shirt off him.
Then take the shirt to your new machine and repair it.
Lynn - Let’s see…I have a few pair of pants that need hemming. And a jacket that needs the sleeves shortened. And my horse needs a new blanket.
And when you finish that I’ll have more for you to do, Cinderella!
StG
DROOL!!! I use my kitchen table and a sewing center in the mudroom. Supplies and fabric stay in a small dresser in the bedroom and two under-counter wheeled drawer units under the sewing center.
Yep, that’s quilting, whether it’s patchwork or not. The pieced top is really not the “quilt” part, it’s the sewing between layers–the quilting–that makes it a quilt. What you’re producing there are called whole-cloth quilts.
sunflower (mrs longhair) has a Bernina 145s She has been quilting for a few years. We have enough fabric around here to gift wrap the house a couple of times
See…?!
She hasn’t been back tonight.
Sewn herself up into the quilt, I bet. :eek:
I’m still alive. But I’m BUSY.
Tell me…do “hand-stitched” quilters still kind of look down on machine quilters? I had a friend whose granny taught her to quilt by hand and she dismissed machine quilters as frauds. I remember my friend saying that “the back side has GOT to look as good as the front of the piece or you have to rip it out and start over.” I don’t think I’d have the patience for that.
Speaking for my mom and me, in some sense yes. What I’m talking about is people who finish scads of quilt tops and then send them out to be quilted. I don’t consider that having made the quilt. You made the top, which is lovely.
That said, machine quilting is an art in itself and can be quite impressive, especially if the quilter is sensitive to matching the quilting design to the pieced design. Matching in theme and feeling, I mean.
I would never rip out my quilting, though. It’s a work in progress and sometimes it’s better than others. The back stitches for me are shorter than the front ones, and the stitches on the back are shorter than the blank spaces between on the back.
My mom, however, sews 22 stitches to the inch (counting front and back) and the back and front look identical. She uses a much shorter needle than I do (she uses a 10 and I use a 7 between), and takes a lot more time to get it right. They’re so close and depending on the tightness of the fabric sometimes she has to use a hemostat to pull the needle through. She’s amazing.
I don’t have the patience for that. I’ll hand-piece and hand-quilt but I tend to not sweat slight imperfections.
Eh, some do, some don’t. Overall, most of the quilters I’ve met have been incredibly supportive and encouraging of anybody who makes any effort at all. Nobody just picks up a needle the first time and turns out stitches like gigi’s mom, after all. People who can quilt like her remember what it was like to be at the low end of the learning curve, and how much work was involved in climbing that hill, and how proud they were all of their projects while they were learning.
And even hard-core do-everything-by-hand quilters recognize that there’s a) a time to just hurry up and get the thing done, already, and b) there can be as much of a learning curve to machine quilting as there is to hand-quilting. Especially with free-motion machine quilting.
Wow…I’m impressed. I would like to try something very small one day. I watch that Quilting Show on HGTV. It’s on very early so I think a lot of people might miss it. They have the most beautiful art quilts. These artists combine talent, vision, and technique to create the most magnificent damned pieces I’ve ever seen. I truly don’t know how they do it. Some of them even have light quilted into them fercrissakes. Watch it if you get a chance.
Ah, yes. 'Twas a sad, sad day in our house when they canceled Simply Quilts. They still show the old ones, on HGTV and on DIY, but there haven’t been any new ones made in over a year.
If they would have just quilted the hostess to a settee somewhere, they’d have been better off. She did some nice quilts, and she had fabulous guests, but a dynamic MC she was not.
Yes, I used to be jealous and intimidated by art quilts until I realized it’s not me. I make simple quilts based on traditional geometric designs. And that’s OK.
The most fun things I ever saw at a guild guest trunk show were two Christmas wall-hangings, one a wreath and one a tree. They were made so that Christmas lights could be attached to the back with the bulbs poked through to the front. You’d think it was tacky but it was actually very cute and whimsical.
That I could do: after all I made a chess set once, with a quilted board made out of graphic black and whites. Inside each square I placed a washer and then quilted the squares. I tied the quilt inside the hole in the washer to keep it in the middle. Then I crafted felt chess pieces and glued magnets on the back to keep them stuck to the board when it is hung up. I had so much fun making those pieces; the queens got little buttons with crowns on them, the bishops got tiny crosses off cheap earrings that I painted black or white. Beaded trims on the various pieces.
But that’s as artistic as I get. 
That DOES sound like fun.
I think that I have the top about 2/3 of the way done. Then I have to clear off the dining table and baste the quilt. I suspect that the hardest part will be keeping the cats off the table…we always tell them that kitties are not allowed on any table, and they keep insisting that they are entitled to be anywhere in the house that they want to be.
Don’t forget about G Street Fabrics, the porn shop of Mid-Atlantic quilters.