How to Make a Lightbox

Do you have a drop-leaf dining table? If so, you can easily make it into a temporary light table.

1. Remove the leaf.

2. Place a piece of glass or plexiglass where the leaf was. If you are going to be using it alot, consider getting a piece of plexiglass cut to the size of your leaf.

3. Place a lamp under the glass or plexi, with the bulb pointing up toward the ceiling.

4. Trace away!

5. For a smaller project, you can tape your items to a well-lit window for the same effect.


I heard this tip from another quilter. I used my lightbox to trace patterns onto black background fabric for an appliqued quilt.

Quilting Tattoos

I have seen these popping up alot lately. I'm not really a tattoo kind of gal, but even I'm starting to think a smallish one would be neat and fun.

I love Karen McTavish's feathers.

Here's a whole batch on flickr.

But here's my favorite, one I could actually see myself getting.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

I did an online challenge with my friend Rachel and finished it yesterday. I try to do something new in each quilt I make, or practice a skill that needs work. On this quilt, I did a stripey binding, cut on the bias.

It was a challenge to figure out how to piece it so that the seams were camouflaged in the red stripes. I love the way it turned out. I used up tons of Christmas scraps, including The Night Before Christmas panels which were supposed to be made to make a book. You can actually read the whole story on the top of the quilt (which Thing One loves).


The back uses up a ton of Christmas fabric too. (No, all those little squares on the back are not pieced, it's printed on the fabric.)

I also made pepper jelly yesterday. A friend had given me a baggie full of jalapenos, and I didn't know what to do with them until my sister told me of her pepper jelly-making and I got the envies. She sent me this recipe. It was surprisingly easy and fun. It made me feel like Betty Crocker!



The peppers look so Christmasy in their jars.

And an added bonus: I found a bottle of mead hidden in the cabinet with my canning jars! Sweet!

My new scheme

I just finished working on my guild's annual challenge. The assignment we received several months ago, was to choose one word out of the pot, and make a quilt that embodied that word, using only two colors.

I picked "Scheme."

I thought of two ideas almost immediately. I sketched them out when I got home that night, then got involved with other things.

Last night, three nights before the quilt has to be shown completed, I sat down again with my sketch book to decide which of the two ideas I would pursue. I thought of a third idea, spent a couple of hours sketching it out. I bounced it (and the two originals) off my husband when he got home from fire station duty around 11pm. He said that one idea is much more accessible to a universal audience, and he's right, even though it meant the last few hours of work were wasted. I had found the perfect quote so it wasn't a total waste. Jean Jacques Rousseau said "There are two things to be considered with regard to any scheme. In the first place, Is it good in itself? In the second, Can it be easily put into practice?" It ended up tacked onto the "refrigerator" with some buttons in the finished product.

I must interject here that I am so lucky to have a husband who will listen to my midnight ramblings and not only understand them, but give me honest and sound advice. He has inspired so many ideas, or come up with great ideas, or helped me work through my own ideas.

The idea was to show the boys looking up at a cookie jar on top of the refrigerator, scheming about how to get at the treats.

It's hard to think that those angelic faces could ever do anything naughty. The other morning, upon waking, I found the boys sitting at the table, merrily eating their respective bowls of cereal with milk. This was somewhat unusual. The cereal is in a very high cabinet over the stove.

"Did daddy fix you cereal before he left?"

"No, Mama, we got it ourselves."

"How?"

"With two stepstools stacked up, and the kitchen tongs."

Egads. No mother needs a heart attack before her first cup of coffee!

So, today, I started working in earnest. I started by photographing the boys. This required a tiny bribe of Halloween candy to get them to pose and repose.


Thing One is thinking about wings, since he is obsessed with bugs and airplanes. Thing Two, my little engineer, is thinking about building stairs.
This is the finished quilt.

I had a ton of fun doing the "thread painting" around the cookie jar.

I also did some fun free motion of quilting of wing shapes and traditional "feather" shapes in the black background, although you can't see them unless you are really close. I got lots of positive feedback at the guild challenge meeting. This will go in the spring quilt show with all the other (21) challenge quilts.

Home Sweet Homeschool

I'm making a little quilted wall hanging for our front door. Ever since I heard that some homeschooling families get turned into Child Protective Services occasionally by their neighbors because they think they kids are truant, I have been on a mission to tell all my neighbors we're homeschoolers. I want a sign so that even the mailman, UPS guys, etc know I'm not a neglectful parent even though my dirty kids are running around shoeless in the front yard on a school day.

I need some help, though. I need to decide exactly what words to put on my quilt.

Home Sweet Home School?

Home is Where the School Is?

Homeschoolers Live Here

Homeschooling Family

Cole Family Homeschool

What's your vote?

Try Angles

A friend and I are doing a round robin together. We each started a quilt center, then passed it to the other person, who does something to the quilt, then we switch again, until we deem the quilts "done." We each put a box of fabric together that we wish to be in the quilt, and decided on rules (she and I are very relaxed about the rules--for this, basically anything goes. But some round robins are quite strict as to time frames, size, what fabrics you can use, etc.).

I got mine back last week. It looked like this.

Isn't the embroidery pretty?

I stared at it for a week. I didn't know what to do next! I looked online at border treatments everyday and debated, and sketched.

I knew I'd be seeing some quilting friends at Bunco tonight, so this afternoon I took it out to put it with my bag so I could ask their opinions about how to proceed. Well, inspiration struck, right there in the midst of my scrap piles and laundry baskets.

I had just seen an easy method for making a dogtooth border. The focus fabric I chose has a dogtooth-type border on it.

But I was a bit afraid of it. Like many beginning quilters, I have a fear of triangles. Templates. All those bias edges. Terrifying.

But after reading through the directions, I decided it didn't sound too difficult and it was worth a try. I had to make my template three times. But I finally got it right!

I'm so glad I tried! I made a small inner border to bring my measurements up to what they needed to be to fit, then added the dogtooth border.

My corners are lousy, but I don't care. I learned something new today!

Pinwheels and Prairie Points

A while back, I gave you a sneak preview of my latest quilt. It is yet another baby quilt! So many babies on the way.

I found this pattern online and altered it slightly. I did not use a charm pack, I just cut scraps into five inch blocks, and I added more blocks. I used 18 blocks, 16 on front, and 2 on the back. Eighteen is a good luck number. A good explanation of its significance can be found here.

Those mysterious 2.5 inch squares were for prairie points! I've never made them before so this was a fun new project.

So here it is! I love the way quilts look hanging on our fence. It brings a touch of country to these city suburbs!

I still have to finish the binding, then on to the next project!

Row, Row, Row your Quilt

I was recently introduced to the idea of a row quilt through my quilting guild. We are hosting a quilt bingo in October, and if you aren't able to donate a finished quilt for a prize, you were asked to donate rows for a few quilts. Here are some examples. I spent one day this week sewing some rows.

The two french braid rows are the same set of fabrics, just put together differently. These were my first braid quilting, and my first attempt at separating fabric solely on value.

The other three are strip-pieced and cut into eight inch sections. On two, I rotated every other block; on the last one, I just pieced them all the same direction.

I can't wait to see the quilt bingo row quilts put together! They are all autumn colors and will be truly stunning based on the rows I have seen at guild so far!

Maverick Stars

I've been working with Bonnie Hunter's Maverick Stars pattern on a baby quilt. I finished this little gem at craft night last night. I'm quite happy with it. I think the only thing I'd change is that next time I'd make it larger.

I added white sashing between the blocks to space out the stars a bit. I looked for multi-colored fabric in my stash of novelty fabrics for a border but just didn't like any one enough, or didn't have enough of any one. So I decided to piece a border with leftover 2.5 inch squares.

For the backing, I used up a piece of fabric I have never liked but I thought went well with this quilt. It has little kids' faces on it.
My next decision was how to bind the quilt. I didn't want white, or black, or any solid color. I wanted multi colored to blend with the scrappy border. So I found a chunk of pretty obnoxious teddy bear fabric that had the right colors and made binding from that. I think it turned out nicely!
And this came 100% out of my existing stash! I love it when I can finish a project without buying anything new.

Current Quilting Projects

I finished two quilts last week. The first was a baby gift for our new nephew.

I realized halfway thru piecing that all my blue and white four patches were turned 90 degrees. But there was no way in heck I was going to rip all those seams and re do it. I don't think the baby will notice. The scrappy border was fun to make.

The second is a quilt for my youngest. This was a block of the month at my guild, and I actually sat down and made a bunch of them at the same time. This is the first quilt I quilted on a longarm sewing machine. It was a good first quilt for that, since I practiced making a different design in each jar, and in each lid. This week, I'm trying to finish another baby quilt. It is made of Maverick Stars from Bonnie Hunter's website. She gives excellent directions. (Before you click on that link, think twice....I promise you will spend hours there. Don't say I didn't warn you.) These are so great for using up scraps, especially 2.5 inch squares, and smallish triangles.

Aren't they cute? They are so fun to make. I get very bored making the same block over and over. These are each different, even though they are made the same way.

I think I will put sashing between each blocks, to space them out a bit. Give they eye a place to rest. There's a lot going on in this quilt.

I saw Bonnie Hunter speak at my guild meeting last year. She is amazing. I like her scrap system. She preaches that you pay the same amount of money per yard for those scraps, so use them up! I spent an entire week last year, about two hours per day, cutting my scraps into strips and squares. I used many of those squares in these stars.