Appleton Dance

by Alisa I recently made a small quilt for myself! I saw this Instagram post by Kelly of @jeliquilts back in the Spring and I just fell in love. The inspiration is much more beautiful -- and quilterly -- than mine. I immediately went looking for that rainbow fabric.It is a Kona Cotton jelly roll from 2017 that was a tricky to find. I found the Kona Cotton New Bright Palette Rollup on an Etsy shop where it is now sold out. Missouri Star still has it on their site as "out of stock" so I do have hope they will restock. Meanwhile, the charm packs are available.If you are searching for this, be aware that there is a Kona Brights Palette with a slightly different color selection. I love this Kona New Bright one, but I'm sure there are tons of solids that would look just as lovely.My original plan was to sew 30 of the strips in the 41 strip pack together to get a 42 x 60-inch center panel and then border that six-inches all around and end up around 54 x 72-inches, and then send …

by Linda Theil

I bought a panel with four "Botanica" placemats by Michel Design Works for Northcott and a "jelly-roll" of 42-inch by 2.5-inch strips of all the fabrics in the "Botanica" line so that I could use the strips to make a quilt-as-you-go backing for the "Botanica" placemat panels.


I needed a fifth placemat, so I used scraps of the ginko leaf pattern from Michael D'Amore's "Daily Zen" line for Benartex to make the backing for the fifth placemat. I had to match the pattern to get a piece big enough for the back. Nice job, huh?


Quilt-as-you-go is an easy technique for making placemats since the quilting is done along with the piecing.

Each placemat on the "Botanica" panel is 21 x 14-inches, so for each placemat I cut a piece of quilt batting in that size, and spray basted one placemat from the "Botanica" panel to one side of the batting with Spray-n-Bond Basting Adhesive.

I chose the fabric strips fr…

Spencer Ogg Packing Pods in Three Sizes
by Linda Theil

I ordered the Diane Spencer Ogg Packing Pods in Three Sizes from her website for £7.50 -- around $10 -- no shipping. The pattern includes a PDF pattern printout and access to an online tutorial at the Spencer Ogg channel on YouTube.




I made my packing pods with Moda's "Best of Morris Fall" package of 10-inch squares that I purchased on sale from Missouri Star Quilt Co. for about $17 plus shipping. That Morris precut is no longer available at MoStar, which is just as well, because the 10-inch cuts are really not appropriate for this pattern. I had to piece the precut squares and recut the pieced fabric to fit the pattern. Even fat-quarters would have worked better, but the Robert Morris reprints were too seductive to dissuade me from doing my best to make them work. The pods don't actually require a lot of fabric, but you do need a couple of longer slices to make the gussets.

The pods are lightweight and beautifull…

Alisa wanted to make a small-sized, care pod for a youngster, and I mentioned I had those cute animal panels from the "Thicket" collection by Gingiber Zest for your Nest released in 2016 by Moda. I have two sizes: the large panels measure 17 x 22-inches with a motif of about 10 x 15-inches, and  the small panels measure 9 x 11-inches with a motif of about 6 x 8-inches. (The size of each animal varies slightly.)

The Spencer Ogg "Doorstep Care Pod" pattern we used called for a body piece of 14 x 31-inches. The simplicity of the pattern makes it very easy to adjust the size. I decided to use the small panel so I cut it out and used some cream-colored yardage from my stash to make the back and facings.

I cut the back to match the size of the fox panel at 9 x 11-inches, but extended the length of the back piece by 1.5-inches to make the body of the bag a little longer so that I wouldn't cut off the fox's tail when I boxed the bottom.

I fused a lightweight iron-…

by Linda Theil

Yesterday we had a fun and exciting haiku poetry class with Emerson, Jake, Sawyer, Alisa, and Angie. We used the Zoom video conferencing app/software to share our poetry lesson online. I wrote the class outline and Alisa created a PowerPoint presentation that I shared as a separate window in the Zoom meeting. Below is a screen shot of our Zoom classroom.

A PDF file of our haiku lesson is online at "Haiku Lesson in Poetry by Linda Theil". The class is designed to last from 20-30 minutes. We used the recording feature in the Zoom program to record the entire class.

The linked poem in our cover shot at the top of this page is a tanka Alisa and I wrote for our haiku class. The art in the photo is by Emerson. We used the Over design app to highlight work by all the poets in yesterday's class.







Resources:
Haiku class outline
https://tinyurl.com/yckralmg
and
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Zz-PgKh8TbW_PLmMxg4cH6NGBvE2OURz/view?usp=sharing

Alisa wrote:

As I was finishing up the baby quilt I made in January 2020 I found out that a good friend was becoming a first-time Grandma to a little boy.  It seemed like a no-brainer to use the same fabric collection to make another tiny quilt as a gift.
I used a leftover charm pack, Delfina Single Scoops by Edyta Sitar of Laundry Basket Quilts for Andover Fabric and ordered up yardage of Confetti Blue Moon, Spots Navyand Ladybug Ivory from the same collection to have on hand for the borders, backing and binding.

I didn't really have a plan in mind for the quilt, so I started by dividing the charm pack into color groups - light blue, medium blue, dark blue, tan and cream and made a bunch of half-square triangles using the lightest color as the constant in all of the blocks.
Once I had 64 of these blocks I started trying out different designs on my design board.  I tortured both quilter and non-quilter friends with requests for feedback.  Decisions were always split.  Looking back…