Sweet River Studios

I admit I've been bad.  I haven't posted in weeks. After putting some of the rows together for this quilt and fighting a lot with it, I've taken a break from my quilt and yesterday I took my machine in for an cleaning.  So let me tell you how I started putting these blocks together. First, I started with my sashing.  All the sashing does is hide the seams from sewing the blocks together. When I was picking my fabric, I admit I just didn't care what my sashing looked like at this point, so its the same fabric as the backing.  To make the sashing, I used 1.5" strips x width of fabric and folded each side in towards the middle about 1/4" towards the middle and ironed. The ends are not quite to the center which is fine. I still don't have all the inner/outer border blocks done yet but I did start putting some of the rows together.  I used an all cotton thread to sew the blocks together.  Just line up what designs you can (assuming there are any) and...

Well, we finally got all of our blocks for the quilt to finish up.  This was my first block of the month and I'm fairly sure its my last.  This was just too slow for me.  I know they want to you to come back to the quilt shop each month to try to get you to buy more stuff but face it, we're going to buy what we need where we want to.  If I need something and I want it now or I know the shop has it, I'll go get it if not then I might look online for my item.  All I know is, I don't like getting my patterns a few at a time.  I could've been much farther along in this quilt if I had had my patterns. So block of the month style just doesn't work for me. So let's talk about this Block A6H5.  This block was fairly easy to do. I guess they are all now. Practice makes perfect, but there are a lot of thread changes which is fairly consistent with the applique border blocks. And since there are a lot of changes I decided not to do a video. First step is to s...

I know you've probably seen or heard of these bowls. In case you haven't, these are sewn bowls that you can microwave but they won't get hot.  You know when you microwave a bowl of oatmeal or a mug of tea and you reach in to get your stuff out and burn your fingers? Well, if you put the bowl or mug in a "microwave-a-bowl" first you won't get burned. So I decided to make some. They're really easy to make. I know a couple ladies make them for craft shows each fall and they practically walk out the door.  First of all, here's what you'll need to make these: Materials: Microwaveable 100% Cotton Batting (Pellon or Warm & Natural) 100% Cotton Fabric 100% Cotton Thread Notice how there is nothing on the list like polyester.  That's because we don't want anything to catch fire. Hot tea, good. Fire, bad. You get the idea.  You can get all of these materials at any craft store. So let's get started.  You can make these any size yo...

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...