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When I was a kid, I made simple friendship bracelets by braiding three strands of floss. I always envied the girls with thicker, more colorful bracelets and I remember trying to learn how to make them, but never meeting anyone with the patience to really teach me. I forgot about them until I saw this post about friendship bracelets on the Purl Bee. The link contains great photos and step-by-step instructions. Man, I wish I had the internet when I was coming up!

As usual, I think I messed up every single step possible.

Mistake 1.

I went to City Quilter to buy a few colors of embroidery floss and only saw these beautiful hand-dyed colors.

They are beautiful, made in America, and use environmentally friendly dyes, but they are also double the price of regular floss.

I am all about paying more for better quality and supporting smaller businesses, but not the first time I’m making a new project. If I looked six inches to the left, I would’ve seen drawers and drawers of cheaper floss which would’ve made much more sense to practice on. I wish I saved these fancy flosses for an actual friend.

Indy, as always, was helpful.

Mistake 2.

I have no idea how to tie a slip knot. I watched many a youtube video on it, but still had to do it four or five times until it was centered and small enough.

Mistake 3.

For some reason, I imagined it would take me 15 minutes to tie these knots and finish this bracelet. It took more than three hours mostly because of Mistake #4.

Mistake 4.

I tried to keep all the colors laid out flat and pulled tight as I made the knots, but somewhere along the line, I realized the entire right side of the bracelet was messed up and getting worse and worse with each row.

I had to pull out most of the bracelet and start again. This brings me back to Mistake 1. If I wasn’t using the designer label floss, I would’ve just started fresh. I literally cried.

Although the process was a rough first try, I am really happy with the final result.

I ended it with two braids that slip through the slipknot and tie in a bow.

The hand-dyed fabrics gave the final product a pretty interesting look. The green, for example became paler or deeper in different sections.

Although the inconsistent colors made the bracelet more interesting, the inconsistent knots are more YIKES than interesting.

At long last, the Bounce top is finished!

I decided to take some pictures with some New York City architecture that echos the circle motif.

St. Vincent’s Hospital.

The Maritime Hotel.

The Cabana bar outside of the hotel.

Hotel’s porthole windows.

In early December, Nova posted her pattern for Pillow Pockets.

The pattern was so incredibly cute, I just knew I wanted to make one for my niece, but I wasn’t sure I could pull it together in time for her birthday. I kept seeing the pattern pop up all over the internet and read about how fun and simple this pattern is to complete, so I thought I would give it a try.

After an evening pulling out all of my fabrics and choosing colors for the Dresden Plate, I spent some time trying out different backgrounds for the pillow. I really like the high contrast between the background fabric and the Dresden Plate in Nova’s samples.

I also liked the idea of something more harmonious.

In the end, I decided on the strawberries because pink is the girl’s favorite color and I’m not sure what other project lends itself so well to hot pink strawberries.

The Dresden plate was straightforward to piece together, but I had never made a pillowcase before, so I anticipated pulling out a lot of stitches stitches and trying to figure it all out. Indy settled in for a long evening, but the pattern was actually a snap.

I found every step of the way so rewarding. Each night I worked on this, I went to sleep pretty pleased. I have had a couple dud patterns recently, so I am grateful for the clear instructions I know I saved myself a lot of headache.

Finished with hours to spare before her party!

I kept the quilting super simple.

I used a complimentary stripe for the fabric in the back. I just added this to my stash after visiting (read: paying extremely high prices for little bits of gorgeous fabrics) Britex in San Francisco.

Okay, EXTREMELY simple quilting. Don’t mind the cat hair.

I received a stack of Robert Kaufman Poseidon solids for Christmas and the one I tried out as a background fabric ended up making a perfect for the binding.

I repeated the stripe inside the pocket.

I am really happy with the final product.

The birthday girl was pretty happy too!

I made a few mug rugs for my coworkers this year. I lost my camera for a couple days, so here are some blurry shots from my cell phone.

I bought the red mugs from Bed Bath & Beyond and found some glittery ribbon at a card store. I rolled up the “rug” and put it inside and wrote a card.

The dots were leftover from Bounce, and the smaller prints were from my Trip Around the World quilt. I bought the square floral piece from a quilt show in Somers. I’m really pleased how smaller print fabrics compliment it!

I didn’t use a pattern, but it is similar to my last mug rug. This one came out a little smaller, which I think is how they are “supposed to be.” (Unlike the corners of this project, which are not at all how they are “supposed to be.”)

I quilted it with my walking foot on my machine. This seems like the kind of project that should zip up in no time, but I made six of them and ran into a bunch of small issues so the project took a couple weeks of evenings. In the end, I’m happy with how they came out and I think my coworkers will really enjoy them!

I pulled out my fabric stash with some of my recent purchases and threw together some things I thought looked nice together.

I’m thinking about making some mini-quilts, or, as they would be used here, cat mats.

I bought this pattern at Keepsake Quilting over the summer, and despite the delay in posting the results, I did actually have this finished three weeks before Halloween!

My rug is such a heinous back-drop. Sorry about that. This should be the kind of project that zips up in a night or two, but I broke down while working on this multiple times.

Do you see this shape? I somehow imagined sewing this to fusible web (a light material that has glue on one side), then turning it inside out and gluing it down. Turning it inside out didn’t work out at all. Turns out I needed a different gluey material. I needed to cut everything out all over again. Then, I completely destroyed my iron with glue. The pattern also didn’t include enough fabric for a backing or a binding. Thanks, guys! That wasn’t a pain at all!

The good news is I am starting to get the hang of quilting on my machine for these small projects.

I lost my rotary cutter and realized that my sewing area was getting slightly out of hand.

I opened up all my shoe boxes, cloth bins, and plastic containers and laid out all of my supplies to get them organized. I was pretty amazed with how well stocked I am.

Neutral thread? Check.

Safety pins? Check.

Walking foot? Why yes, three.

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Needles? For every type of project imaginable.

Miscellaneous tools from quilt shows? All of them.

And yes, Two rotary cutters.

Indy’s favorite necklace? Always.

On November 5th and 6th the Evening Star Quilters Guild of Mineola had their annual guild show. It was a small show, but there were many inspiring quilts.

If you look closely, you can see these are all batik fabrics. I think some quilts that use these fabrics become all about showcasing the prints, but her subtle use really lets the pattern shine through.

My camera was incapable of capturing this lovely tone of lavender, so enjoy this sub-par version.

I love the use of near-solids in this quilt. It’s so colorful without feeling like a rainbow.

Can’t go wrong with a scrappy log cabin.

Something modern! And beautiful quilting.

Double Irish Chain. Really perfect version of this classic pattern.

This woman purchased all of the handkerchiefs from eBay. I was thinking this would be a great way to zip up a simple quilt, but then she went ahead and intricately quilted each block.

I love this pattern.

Love. I think I’ll make something very similar someday soon.

Cathedral Windows.

This is sorcery to me.

Oh HANDS DOWN my favorite of the show.

Delilah’s Doll Shoppe!

Beads on the trees.

Apparently the bought the pattern at City Quilter. I hope it’s still there!

This was my take home from the show. I’m psyched.

I started this quilt in 2007 or 2008.

It was the second quilt top I made so I was looking for something just a bit more challenging than my first top (which is still being hand quilted). I picked up the pattern at The Cambridge Quilt Shop, and then annoyed a very kind Joanne’s sales associate by asking her to cut me a 1/4 yard of all of these fabrics. “Well this will certainly be a scrappy quilt,” she said.

One of the bigger mistakes I made was not cutting off back layers of fabric, so the top became very thick and quilting this by hand through all those layers would be impossible. This lead to my main problem- I don’t know how to quilt by machine.

After a couple months of trying to shove this quilt under my machine and spinning it to create straight lines around the stars, I gave up. My mom’s quilting teacher, Margaret, helped me let go of this insane idea and simplify the quilting design into squares rather than a more complicated pattern around the stars.

I’m so happy with how it came out. I took these pictures before I added the binding around the edge and pulled out all the loose strings.

I submitted my quilt to an art show at my job and they will have it hanging until January! I’m so pleased to have another finished quilt under my belt.

I can’t wait to have it home.

This summer was packed with local trips to really cool little places. I made it to Mystic, CT; Bar Harbor, ME; Lake George, NY; Poquott, NY; New Paltz, NY; Boston, MA; Manchester, NH; Portsmouth, NH; and to a wedding in a cutesy little town on the Hudson River.

But for quilting, New Hampshire was the place to be. I went to a great little quilt shop in Portsmouth and bought a slew of over-priced fat quarters. They were beautiful, but I paid!

I really love them and I knew I’d need a bunch more fabrics to make a full quilt, but I didn’t want it to be super matchy and use fabrics all by the same designer, so I picked up a bunch more fabrics at the Pennsylvania Quilt Extravaganza. They match beautifully, but not so much that it will look like a Pottery Barn Quilt.

Then I decided to run a little test that Kaffe Fassett talked about in the workshop I went to. His philosophy is that the most interesting quilts should be a mixture of light and dark fabrics and contrasts that excite the eye. It is actually really hard to tell if a fabric is “light” or “dark” based on color alone, and Kaffe carries around a red magnifying glass that helps him see the tones. He said another way to see the tones is to take a black and white shot of the fabrics:

Uh oh. These fabrics are all different colors and prints, but in the harsh black and white photo, they are so, so blah. I think it’s going to take a lot more contrasting fabrics to make this into a beautiful quilt.

I also made it to Keepsake Quilting!! The mecca!

I didn’t realize we were so close to this shop, but there was a sign in the road that said Keepsake was coming up on the right and I opened the door in mid-traffic and ducked and rolled out of the car. The people were so friendly and helpful and the selection was mind blowing.

I had no idea where to begin, but I had been eyeing this kit in their catalog for a few months. The color in this photo is terrible, but I bought the pattern on the left and all the colors so I am ready to go. It is probably too ambitious for this halloween, but maybe!