Sweet River Studios

In the book Applique Mastery by Philippa Naylor, you're given a a template of one quarter of the quilt and it is very, very large but thankfully, the author had the foresight to include the patterns on the back pages of the book. I was able to lay the book on my copy machine and scan the pages into either a .PDF or .JPEG files. The Silhouette software only takes .jpegs. I want a lot, if not all, of the applique pieces in this quilt to have folded edges as opposed to raw edge. So that means I need to cut designs out of fusible interfacing and fabric but I need the fabric to be slightly bigger. The idea is to iron the interfacing onto the fabric and have enough fabric around the interfacing to pull over the edges making the edge look nice an neat. If you want raw edge applique pieces, it means that you can see where the fabric has been cut and the edge may fray. You would iron the interfacing onto the wrong side of the fabric first, then cut your piece out in the exact size you ne...

I've picked my fabric, which I agonized over but won't go into the sad details of that. It's just too embarrassing for me. Anyway, according to the pattern, you need 3 printed fabrics and 7 solid type fabrics. I wanted something bright and colorful so shopped online. I can see a lot more fabrics online than at my local quilt shop but I normally don't like to shop online for fabrics that I have something specifically in mind for like this quilt. I can buy random fabric and make it work for totes or bags but for this I would rather see the fabric in person. When you shop online you can't touch it and you can only HOPE the swatch they show is accurate. I really like the ruler at the bottom of the swatch below. This should show you that what you're seeing is a large square of the fabric. This one happens to be around 17x17" some are 12x12" but you get the idea. You should see some repeat in the swatch so you know that the whole pattern is being shown. ...

River and I attended a C-WAGS Scent Trial on April 13 and April 20, at Anything Goes for Dogs in Marysville, Ohio. Both nights, there were 2 trials at levels 3 & 4 each. I signed River up for level 4 only but I wound up signing up for one level 3 trial each night. On April 13, she got 1 Q at level 3 and 1 at level 4.  She did really well the first level 3 search but the first level 4 search, she got 3 of the 4 scents. I think she got frustrated because she just started batting around the boxes and alerting when the scent wasn't there but she got one of the scents that was about 3 feet off the ground. The second search she did really well but a train came through the area and she was a bit nervous and stopped searching. I finally got her searching again and she found the last scent. The Level 4 searches were fairly hard. A lot of the shorter dogs had never scented anything 3 feet in the air before but that height is within the rules. On April 20, River was entered in 1 l...

I found a great book called Applique Mastery by Philippa Naylor. In it, she throughly goes over her techniques for applique and her pattern for her quilt called Bird by Bird. I admit, I don't usually follow a pattern exactly unless its making a tote or bag or something and I kinda have to for it to turn out. I simply mean that where a pattern says use X color or X shape, I probably won't. I'll change little things making them more mine so by the time I'm done, I doubt my quilt will look exactly like hers. And that's okay. The quilt has a lot of applique pieces. Hence the title applique mastery. No I didn't count all the pieces but clearly there are a several hundred or more in this 74x74" quilt. If I would use a pair of scissors to cut all the interfacing pieces and fabric pieces and do it all by hand, I would be dead by the time it all got cut out let alone sewn down. So, that's where my handy Cameo Silhouette comes in. I bought one to cut ou...

I finished the 50th Anniversary quilt for my parents in February and I've taken a few weeks off to think about my next art quilt project. I usually find inspiration by picking a subject first, then I consider what else I can put on the quilt. I decided my next subject would be my grandmother. She will be 88 in April and she's my last remaining grandparent. She's a really kind woman and I'm glad she's been in my life so I thought I'd do something special. Since I made a colored pencil portrait of my parents, I thought I'd do the same for this quilt. So I went through all the family photos and picked a few pics of my grandma that looked nice. I picked one from when she was a teenager, one with her holding a great-grandchild and one with her with some flowers she got on Mother's Day. Grandma loves birds, flowers, Ohio State football, has no sweet tooth to speak of, has always weighed 127 lbs. her entire life and loves everyone she meets. Since I can...

I signed River up for the scent league at Anything Goes for Dogs in Marysville. We had two trials in March and I'm pleased to say that River finally, finally got her level 2 Title. She's had Levels 1 and 3 but Level 2 remained elusive. On the second trial, I signed her up for 2 searches at Level 1 and 2 each. Usually, she's quite excited when she first goes in to search and alerts to the wrong box since she's more interested in just running around, so we get it wrong. But I'm happy to say that she seemed to focus much more quickly this time and she qualified in all 4 searches. These Q's at the levels she's already titled in now go towards her ACE in those levels. In order to get an ACE in Level 1, you need 10 Q's. This takes awhile since not many places are holding CWAGS scent trials in Columbus. River is also scheduled for the second scent league in April at Anything Goes as well. Next month is levels 3 and 4. Since we have no Q's at level 4, I...

River is my 4 year old (soon to be 5) German Shepard mix female dog. We are pretty active in the dog world. We take agility classes, scent work and barn hunting classes and on occasion, we take obedience classes. And 80% of the time, she's great around other dogs but she has some trouble with dogs that give her direct eye contact or have a certain look. She will lung to the end of the leash and bark like she wants to kill something and she seems to do this quite randomly. She'll interact with a certain dog or ignore them completely for a few weeks then at the 5th encounter she lungs and barks. So she's not horrible but if I can work with her to where she doesn't do this anymore or a lot less that would great. Some dogs are just genetically pre-disposed for certain behavior but I'm hoping to get rid of this behavior or at least mostly. So, I signed her up for a class at PosiDog in Hilliard, called Rowdy & Reactive. The class is held on Sunday's and is a rol...