I’m back in my Bookmarks folder today to bring you another Melange on this happy Monday. More quilting bookmarks:

StenSource International, Inc.—I found this place in 2004 when they had a booth at the Houston show. Home of the Creative Iron, fusible, laser cut fabric appliqués. I’ve yet to make something with these appliqués, but it’s on my list of to-dos. And check out these coordinating stencil sets that you can cut apart; they have all the stencils you’d need for a quilt, big blocks, small blocks and borders, all on one stencil. I suppose you wouldn’t even have to cut them apart, and then they’d be all together when you need to use them.

Red Rock Threads—This place is my favorite to buy threads! Based in Pahrump, Nevada (near my Las Vegas hometown), this nice lady has LOADS of different brands of thread in stock, all the time. She does one thing, thread, and she does it very well indeed. (Okay, she has some needles and embroidery supplies, but she does them well too.) Shipping is extremely reasonable; it used to be free, and just after she was forced to change policy due to rising Postal Service fees (long after the fees actually rose, btw), I talked to her on the phone and she actually apologized and said she felt soooo bad that she’d had to start charging shipping. If only other mail order businesses were like this, right? There’s lots of extra, free info on the site about threads, as well as conversion charts. Quick ordering, quick shipping, great customer service, what more could you ask for? Well, I could ask for YLI Soft Touch, which seems to be the only thing I’ve ever wanted that she didn’t have!

The Quilters Quarter—I have no idea why I bookmarked this one, or when for that matter, but I am happy to see that they have YLI Soft Touch cotton thread! I have a heck of a time finding this thread online for some reason. I use it in the bobbin for machine embroidery, though I’m not sure why I started that either. Somehow it just seems to make sense to use cotton thread if I’m doing embroidery for quilts; you know, that “cotton fabric, 100% cotton thread” thing. Quilters Quarter has a pretty nice selection of other quilting items, and I see a good selection of stencils there. Read the rest of this entry »

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Have you ever considered how much power a small, seemingly insignificant decision can have? Even when you’ve thought and planned and imagined what the outcome would be, sometimes the smallest little pebble can make the deepest waves. There are times you can move backward and reassess, and then make changes and move on in a different direction. But sometimes, for either good or ill, you’re stuck with it, as well as all of the other decisions you’re then forced to make because of the first one.

Don’t get me wrong, some small decisions turn out well or even better than planned, and have positive effects on other things, and we call those “good” and perhaps even “serendipitous.” It’s the ones that have, dare I say it, possible negative effects, that I’m concerned with today, and we call those decisions “hasty” or “rash.” Funny ol’ world, isn’t it?

Friday evening I was bound a determined to progress on this quilt, and I was at a point where I didn’t know where to go next. I know how I want to quilt certain part of the quilt, but some parts are still a bit fuzzy, and have to wait until others are quilted to see how it looks. I’d finished the quilting in the medallions, adding a little clamshell edge just around the inside edge of the ovals, which added the perfect finishing detail to the radiating lines. (Okay, so that was a hasty good decision. )

I decided to start adding the little tiny pearls quilting at the very edge of the green border, since that was a plan from the beginning. Problem was, I didn’t know exactly what color thread to use. Choosing one and diving in, I quilted about 25 of these little, teensy, tiny circles, and then decided they were the wrong color thread, and had to spend at least an hour taking out microscopic stitches in silk thread. NOT fun. Gee, if I’d tried the circles first on the sample, I’d have known that the color wasn’t right, but did I do that? Nah. A hasty decision with negative results. Read the rest of this entry »

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Here’s an oldie but goodie that hangs on the wall in my stairwell. I completed this in 1999 (or so it says on the back; this one actually has a label of sorts, unlike many of the other older quilts around here—shame on me, I know), but it was probably started long before that. I remember piecing the top, and then putting it away for a while because I didn’t know how to quilt it. I even had a place to hang the thing when I pieced it; our bathroom was decorated in these colors, but by the time the quilt was completed, the decorating scheme in the bathroom was on its way out the door due to a move since the new bathroom didn’t have wall space.

While I was preparing this post, I searched on my hard drive for the instructions for this, as it was from a pattern I thought I had found on the Internet. Couldn’t remember the name of course, so I never did find it. Lo and behold, when I looked at the back of the quilt, there was the name of the pattern! Dang, I amaze myself sometimes, and it isn’t even that hard. I have to be honest, it probably wasn’t forethought that made me note the name of the pattern on the back of the quilt, it was more like being unable to come up with some other creative name for the quilt!

Anyway, the Twisted Tails Mystery Quilt pattern is still available out there as a quick Google search proved, though Quiltzine was not where I got the pattern way back when. Now that I’ve really thought about it, Birgit from Patchcom gave me the pattern, but she did tell me that it came from the Internet, so maybe she picked it up there. Read the rest of this entry »

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