Appleton Dance

Comet A3 photo by Abhijit Patil, San Mateo, CA, Oct 2024 by Linda Theil What it was like in the United States the week before the 2024 election? Here in Michigan, it is the most magnificent autumn ever. The air, the light, the mottled sky, the russet, ochre, olive landscape, woodsmoke, langour, and anticipation -- all speak of an iconic, Platonic ideal October. Every hour is an omen of final beauty. Like the dinosaurs awaiting the comet, we creatures here in Michigan feel deep in our bones an uncanny forboding of the end of the world as we know it. We even have our own comet to dream on.

by Linda Theil  I saw a Shabby Fabrics advertisement for a mug rug with an autumn leaf motif made from a scrappy bear-paw block that was so cute I had to try it for myself. I watched the advertisement video for the mug rug kit, and I looked up a free bear-paw pattern on the Fat Quarter Shop site.  One of the tips from the video was to use a design board to keep your bear-paw pieees organized and placed correctly. I used my cutting mat as the design board for my prototype. But you can also make a quick and easy design board by clipping a piece of batting to a large clipboard. Shows makeshift design board  with design from another project. I gathered up some autumn colored and themed scraps and cut out the following pieces to make my bear-paw/leaf mug rug. My final mug rug is smaller than the one in the video; mine turned out to be 13 x 7 3/4-inches. Cut for mat: backing 15 inches wide x 8-inches high front 6 inches wide by 8 inches high batting 15 x 8-inches 1.5 yards 1-...

 by Linda Theil I needed to make a heart block, and I could have just done a nice raw-edge applique, and that would have been fine; but, I wanted to make something with a little more heart in it. I thought I might have a paper-pieced pattern for a heart, so I pulled out my paper-piecing box and, sure enough, there was a nice heart I had downloaded free from the Crafty Gemini site on the Internet. I even had several made-up samples in my box, and they looked very nice so I decided to paper piece my heart block. This pink and gray heart was one of my samples made using the paper-piecing pattern from Crafty Gemini. I really like paper-piecing. My problem is that years ago I took a paper-piecing class from Kathy Groves who taught us how to work on one side of the pattern without all the flipping back and forth that seems so troublesome to me. But I can't actually remember from one time to the next how to do it correctly. So while I was putzing around with this heart pattern, it occurre...