Surface Design Quilted Postcard

I hardly ever use the decorative stitches on my machine, which is kind of sad.  If you have them, you might as well use it.

I then recently saw this video by Karen Linduska on You Tube and even though I am not making promises which I know I will break, not a bad idea to start thinking about making a couple for Christmas.  

Even though Karen says it can be mailed I am rather skeptical about doing this in South Africa.  So if I ever get to make a couple, it would go with the gifts I hand to people personally.  Take a look at her video.

Stitching Drunkards Paths without pins

I think most of us were taught to use as many as possible pins when stitching Drunkards Path blocks however Kay Nickols has a video on You Tube showing you how a stiletto can make the use of pins obsolete.  Take a look at this.

To be totally honest, I struggle like crazy with the stiletto but I suppose practice makes perfect.

Basic Bargello Quilt Pattern

Rose Smith from Ludlow Quilts has a lovely tutorial for a Bargello quilt.  If you always wanted to make a Bargello but didn't quite know where to start, this is the perfect Bargello to begin with.

Rose offers a written tutorial over HERE or you can see how it is done on this video.

Fabric fundamentals and other videos

To all those who claim to read our blog first thing in the morning and saw that I am really late in posting. I do apologize........  I overslept terribly but it was just SO good, I refuse to apologize too much.  And now I'm off to Hobby X in Bloemfontein!

Chatterbox Quilts has a couple of You Tube videos available to help beginner quilters with the fundamentals of fabric as well as other videos on workstations, setting up your studio, tools for your studio and many more.

Go take a look at these over HERE.

Continuous Prairie points

Towards the end of 2011 one of my beginner quilters (Jolita, this is for you) asked me how continuous prairie points are made.  Their group however grew up and cut the apron strings and now don't come together at my house anymore.  I however still owe Jolita an answer and this is for anyone else who ever wondered about these.

I searched the internet to find the best possible explanation and it turned out to be this video tutorial by Fave Quilts.

Hope this helps.

Christmas stockings tutorial

While I browsed Debs’ blog I found another tutorial again with a video showing how she created this.  Read the blog with the video by clicking HERE.

Pocket Tissue holder

Deb from the blog ‘debzpicady’ went one step further when she made a tutorial for this little pocket tissue holder by sharing it on a video.

Where o where do people find time to do all of this?  Go to this blog post by Deb to watch the video.

The Rolling Stone block

Have you seen any of the Quilty videos by Mary Fons?  The videos takes a while to load, so before starting make yourself a cup of coffee, sit back and give yourself a break.  The video I recently watched was Episode 9 focussing on the Rolling Stone block.

I was unable to ‘pause’ the video and copy a picture of the block, so I had to draw one on EQ to show you what it looks like.

The block gives you the illusion that it has a circle in the centre but has no curved seems.

I then combined the blocks to see what it would look like in a quilt and this was the result using only 2 colors.

Now this gave me the impression of the naughts and crosses game we all know.

When I brought in one more color it changed the look totally as can be seen in the next picture.

Here the circles are prominent in 2 ways, in the yellow block your eye sees the bigger circle and in the orange block you see the smaller center circle and the crosses separating the circle blocks have now disappeared.

In the video Mary Fons shows you how to construct this quilt in a jiffy by using strip sets and a cheater square-in-a-square block and gives you all the measurements needed to construct a block.

To watch this video, click HERE

Hand quilting without threading a needle

The part of quilting I like most is that just when you think you know most of it someone will come up with something new, different or interesting to spur your interest again.

Look at this little machine as demonstrated here by Nancy Zieman.

Neat hey?  So now to find out who in South Africa imports these.

Zipper video tutorial

O how I do love people in blog land who seem to manage their time perfectly and have or find time to make not only ordinary tutorials but video tutorials.

Tonya from Tonya’s Sewing room realized many of her quilting friends are able to make lovely quilted bags but are scared of inserting a zipper.  I wonder if she knows I’m one of them.  Therefore I was really excited to find her video tutorial and I am sure I am not the only one with this little problem.

So do check this video tutorial out and yes, I’d love a little zipper bag too should you happen to make more than one.