Sweet River Studios

I've been working on the outer border for a while now and I'm about 75% done.  Out of 44 blocks I've got around 32 done so I'm getting there. I decided not to do a video of these blocks just photos. There's a lot of fabric placement and thread changes and trying to operate a camera at the same time is just begging for something bad to happen. So I decided not to risk it. Here's the border block and corners. They are the smallest blocks I've done for this quilt. The borders are 4.5'x6" and roughly 12K stitches and the corners are 4.5" square with around 9K stitches. Outer Border Corner The outer borders require some accurate piecing first.  The first piece for the corner is strips of fabrics 1 and 4. The second strip is made from fabrics 3, 1 and 4. In the top photo of the square, strip 1 is the white, brown, white and strip 2 is pink, white and brown. To make the square, stitch out your placement area. Then place strip 1, right si...

This block is part of the applique border. It has two applique flower designs and a lot of stitches. You need fabrics 1, 3, 4, backing fabric, stabilizer, water soluble thread, and all coordinating thread.  If you don't want to use stabilizer for fabric 3 that's your choice. I've been doing it just so that I don't get any puckering since it is heavily stitched.  I figure better safe than sorry. I've gotten 1/2 of the outer border blocks done and haven't worked on the inner border blocks at all. So I've still got a lot of blocks to go. At our last meeting, we decided on a trunk show late January as a show and tell. Assuming I get this thing done by then, I'll drag it in.  I still can't really picture what its going to look like even though I'm doing all the blocks so I'm excited to see how it looks when all the blocks are together.  I know it'll be really pretty and it'll be fun to see everyone else's quilt too. Until then, I...

We finally started the applique border blocks of the Jacobean Journey quilt this month and the instructions that I was given was a little... well, confusing.  According, to Hoopsisters the instructions for several blocks are the same so they don't want to print different blocks with the same type of instructions.  So their solution was to draft the instructions using a sample of the blocks with pictures for that one block. However, additional blocks do not get their own set of pictures but share the same instructions.  For example, if a block has only 2 fabrics (say 1 and 4) you follow instructions A, which will have pictorial examples of only 1 type of block, which may or may not match the block you are currently stitching out.  So this was fairly confusing for me since my Babylock doesn't show file names just pictures and my pictures didn't match the set of instructions (or so I thought) I received since the pictures didn't match at all. So my suggestion would...

This next block we received is block B5 which is the exact same block as B4 and we need to complete 8 of them.  B5 block is the same as B4 except some of the fabrics and thread color is different. I didn't do a video showing this block but here's a picture of blocks B4 and B5 together. B4 is on the left and B5 is on the right. And on a more depressing note, my Babylock Unity has been acting up lately and I was hoping that a good cleaning would take care of the issue but it hasn't.  So I'm going to finish up the remaining B5 blocks I have to do and then take it into the quilt shop.  I don't know why but the machine will just stop during embroidery. No error message, nothing.  It'll start again and sometimes stop again or it will just keep sewing.  There doesn't seem to be any reasoning to it and rebooting doesn't help either so I'll just make a note whenever it stops, take some video (since you KNOW it won't happen when its being repaired!)...

My very first blog post is going to be about one of my favorite topics. Sewing!  Well, to be more specific embroidery.  I got into sewing about 5 years ago after I thought I should know how to at least hem a pair of jeans, which by the way, I still can't do.  I started out doing basic things and eventually got into making purses, totes and quilts. You know, FUN stuff. Not hemming. After many learning moments and a lot of errors over the course of 5 years, I decided to upgrade my small Brother sewing/embroidery machine to a top of line, I can do anything machine. So last May I broke down and got a new machine after weighing the pros and cons of spending thousands of dollars on my new, fledgling hobby.  Enter the Babylock Unity. I took a lot of pictures of the machine after I got it home. Yeah, I know kinda lame but it was brand spanking new and shiny . So of course, I had to memorialize its arrival, because I hope I never have to buy another one. And I was promptl...