pillow and more

Hi, I just got home from a busy few days in lovely Beaumont, TX where the guild there treated me to their southern hospitality and cajun cuisine.  We had a lot of fun learning free motion quilting on a domestic machine.  The ladies were very skilled and they had lots of great tips for me.

Here I am demoing how to quilt a large quilt on my small machine, and I'm doing the hardest part - the middle 4 blocks.

If you want to learn this here in San Antonio, I will be teaching a beginner Free Motion Quilting Class at Memories By the Yard on February 5th: Memories by the yard newsletter  see page 9.

I made this pillow last week, it was a kit that I bought at our quilt show in September.  It was a fun little project.

And I started a new quilting project for a friend - just because I wanted to:  

Carol made this from a pre-fused kit that you may have seen in catalogs.  It's beautiful, BUT, the fusible web is so stiff that my threads are breaking very often and I am finding it very difficult to quilt!  I don't know how these companies expect us to quilt these projects???  Not only is the one layer stiff, but in some places there are several layers of this stiff stuff.  I am determined to do this for Carol, and I will put on my big girl panties and be patient, and just keep rethreading and plugging along.  

This is one reason I loooooove Misty Fuse.  But heck, I have quilted through 5 layers of steam a Seam II and the lite version also.  It doesn't have to be so hard...  

One of the ladies from Beaumont , Anne, is the inventor of these tools: strip stick  Check it out, they are so simple and yet so genius.  You have to try these!