Sweet River Studios

Now that my practice piece is finished, I can move onto wall quilt. I didn't want to do a huge center portrait but I didn't want something super small either. So I settled on 18x18" but the applique blocks I want to put around the center portrait, can be done in 6" or 7". The 6" block says "finishes at 7" but 7 doesn't go into 18 evenly. Starting to see the problem? Of course you are! So that means the blocks have to either finish at 6 (which goes into 18 nicely) or I have to add a border around the portrait and end up with say 21, which 7 goes into. So I thought I'd add a mitered border (which I've never done before) around the center to add 3" making my center 21" square. Background Squares I also stitched out some embroidered background squares from the Feathered Star pattern, which came out really well. I stitched out 2 blocks. On the left, the thread is a very close match to the cream fabric and the one on the rig...

Welcome to 2016! I started this blog in April of 2015 and had 68 posts for the year. I wanted to have a record of what I'd had done all year (minus 3 months) and write about it. The good, the bad and the ugly. And I didn't post as much as a I could simply because I'm not in a race with anyone. Most of my posts were about sewing/quilting, my in-laws 50th Anniversary party, some dog activities and some recipes. I assume 2016 will be much of the same. So let's get to it! This year, is my parents 50th Anniversary in June but they don't want a party. We have a very small family and they don't have a lot of friends so a party with 15 people is fairly pointless. So I thought I'd try to make them a keepsake wall quilt type thing. Since I just finished painting my endangered animal quilt, I figured I could paint a picture of them from their wedding day or maybe do a fabric portrait of them. Either one would probably work and I might do both to see which one I l...

On Saturday, January 17, I went to my local quilt shop, Quilt Beginnings, and everyone who made either a Jacobean Journey or Feathered Star quilt last year brought in their projects. Some were finished, close to being finished or still in pieces.  Below is my quilt.  Its brown, cream, peach and a melon like color.  The blocks have been really fun to do and putting all the blocks together have definitely challenged me and some of the other ladies I spoke with. The next two pictures, are of a mother and daughter and their quilts.  They have a similar theme with black, gray, red, white and dark gold color. When asked if they were going to attempt to do the next Hoopsister's embroidery quilt "Sewn Seeds," which there's a sneak peak of at the end, they both said, "Nooooooooooo." Also, these guys say they're novice sewers but I think they've graduated! This lovely lady, did her Jacobean Journey quilt in red, pink, white and a very light blue...

Well, this is my first post for 2015!  I hope everyone has a great year but as for me, I'm just hoping River can master her own impulses a bit better and finish her weave poles reliably in agility. And yes, she's always watching me and my husband. She's discovered that propping her head up on coffee tables, end tables, TV cabinets, walls, people legs or whatever she can find gives her a lazy advantage in people watching. Clearly, this conserves energy which is important to dogs. Looks darn right uncomfortable if you ask me but she doesn't seem to care. I got my Babylock Unity back from my local quilt shop on December 22.  They found a little glass head from a glass head pin in the port of my embroidery machine so let's hope that fixes the problem of the machine stopping during embroidery. No one likes to have their very expensive machine not working correctly. I'll be like my grandmother breathing in a bag when I'm upset. Not good. I've gotten bac...

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...

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...