Electric Quilt 8

I purchased EQ8 a week ago and wow, does this program do a lot for relatively little money.  I've been using tutorials on their EQ blog, which has many, many lessons and tutorials!  You can use this program to make t-shirt quilts which have different sized blocks depending on the t-shirts that are used.  I used this tutorial to make my first quilt, a small wall hanging.  The program gives me printouts of the yardage and rotary cutting instructions, and I use those to then write the pattern.  The process to write the pattern takes a lot of time and thought but it is so much fun!

The wall hanging will be 17"x 24" when finished.

I finished the quilt in EQ8 and went right to the fabric shop to buy fabrics to make the quilt!  I'm busy writing the pattern this week.  As soon as I make the quilt, testing the instructions I've written I plan on making the pattern a pdf file and will post it here on my blog as a free download.  

Update April 24:  I have finished making the Star Block!  It measures 15-1/2" x 15-1/2".

Update April 25:  I have assembled my wall hanging!  I woke up at 1:30AM thinking about this wall hanging and was writing the pattern in my head.  I decided to get up and work on it since I couldn't go back to sleep anyway.  The pattern is written, all I need to add is a photo of the finished wall hanging. I need to longarm and bind it now.

Update April 26:  I've started longarming the wall hanging, here's a closeup of the quilting on the block...

Grateful quilt pattern

 This quilt is called Grateful.  I fell in love with it the minute I saw it.  I began collecting the fabrics for it a couple months ago. I plan on making it scrappy, but will use the same coloring as the pattern photo.

I started cutting the fabrics a couple days ago and I plan on cutting as I go along.  I am sewing the pinwheel blocks first and I have half of them done already!  Click on the photo and you'll see how scrappy the blocks are.

I found the pattern book at this website:  

https://www.cottagelanequilts.com/shop/p/grateful-book

A Great Devotional!

 This is a devotional from the Proverbs 31 website, written by Meghan Mellinger, it was so good I had to post it here!

“I am tired of being tired.”

The words spilled out of my mouth like the tears from my eyes. Here I was, yet again, in what had become my default state: weary and worn.

Something had to change.

Fat Quarter Storage

My husband built this for me, isn't he wonderful?  It is modeled after the letter organizers you used to see in the school office, the place where teachers would gather their mail.  Only turned on end instead of the usual way.  I have it in the corner of my longarm quilting studio.

On the wall to the left is a tattered and worn quilt made for me by my great grandmother when I was born.  It was used by my mother for all 4 of us kids.

New video from Missouri Star

 This is a wonderful new product for quilting!

Table runners

 I've finished 2 table runners and they were a breeze to make.  The pattern is from Missouri Star Quilt Company called Friendship Chain.  The shorter one is for my sister.  She asked for a table runner with a sunflower theme and I found the perfect fabrics for it!  The other one is for my dining room table.

Do you have negative energy today?

Created by Natalie Pascoe

You know that like attracts like, right? Positive people are drawn to positive energy; negative people are drawn to negative energy. We tend to perceive negative energy as something other people have. Sure, sometimes we feel negative – as in, “go away and leave me alone, world!” but did you know that negativity can be so ingrained in you that it goes unnoticed? 

That’s because negativity sometimes wears a disguise called ‘reality’. It’s easy to rationalize that you’re ‘just being realistic’ in not daring to act on a dream – and believe it! You may assume that positive people are not being realistic – that they’re being naive, that they are in denial with their heads stuck in the sand, that they put on fake smiles in the face of difficulty and so forth. But are they really happy fools or is there something to their positive attitude?

Consider this: since when does ‘being realistic’ necessarily mean that things will go wrong and that you have to accept that as the truth? That doesn't mean that being realistic is automatically negative. When you view the world from a ‘realistic’ standpoint, you can’t help but be negative.

"IF" your version of reality is negative, you are conditioned to believe that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong and whatever can go right, will probably go wrong too. Your unconsciously held beliefs make you into a negative person without your being aware of it!
So – if this negativity is so ingrained in you that you don’t notice it, how do you determine whether you’re stuck in a cloud of negative energy that is attracting the wrong people, wrong situations and wrong feelings? And how can you be sure you’re not perpetuating that negativity?

Van Gogh

This is a baby quilt I longarmed this afternoon, it's a top made by a customer. I used a design that reminds me of the curves in Van Gogh's Starry Night.