• My gamer side. Yeah, like you couldn’t tell from my absence what I’ve been doing for the last two months! The addiction to World of Warcraft rages on. My Night Elf Hunter promptly took a back seat to my Death Knight at level 55, and I’m working on the slow journey to level 80 with the Death Knight. And along the way, I’ve made a few more characters, so I have my own small case of alt-itis. I don’t have the veritable army of alts that my mother has, but still, if I make more than two more new characters, I’ll have to make them on a new server since I can’t have more than ten on the server that I play on now. Then they’ll be the poor relations, since there won’t be any of my other characters over there on the other server to share gold. Gold makes it all so much easier…big surprise…
• My family more often, both the immediate members and the ones far away, as we play WoW together. I see my youngest daughter and husband more, since we all play in my studio together on separate computers. Sometimes we adventure together in-game, or help each other kill the difficult monsters. I talk to my mother, aunt and cousin more, though it must be noted that the conversations are mostly game related and take place in the in-game chat window!
• The taxes. Ugh. Big UGH. But it’s not like you can just not do them. (Though at the moment, it’s tempting to make a try for the “not doing them” technique, and see how long I can stay under the radar on that.) And I have all that business stuff to make it 150% more complicated this year too. Yes, I’m whining. It’s my blog and I’ll cry if I want to!
• My chauffeur side. I spend way too much time driving lately. GuitarGirl has graduated from high school, gotten a new job at the Commissary and started college classes, so my taxi duties have quadrupled (or maybe quintupled) in the last few weeks. Not that I don’t enjoy driving my car as I’m still in love with everything about it even though it’s over three years old. It’s just an awesomeness that I’ll never get over probably. In fact it’s the only thing that makes the taxi duties tolerable at all, but I still would rather pass on it and never leave my house unless I felt like it and there was good shopping on the other end of the journey, tyvm. On top of all that, it’s a bit freaky to have a child in college. I’m just sayin’.

But not in touch with:(...)
Read the rest of Getting in Touch (507 words)

© Nadine for DreamWeaver's Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog, 2010. | Permalink | 15 comments
Post categories: Creativity, Featured, Life, Musings, NOT Quilting, Quilting, Shows & Contests
Tags: AQS, Inchie Quilts, Inchies, moving, vidcast, World of Warcraft, WoW

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© Nadine for DreamWeaver's Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog, 2010. | Permalink | 32 comments
Post categories: Featured, Life, NOT Quilting, Quilting
Tags: gaming, World of Warcraft

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I wanted to make a small scrapbook-type presentation for this gift so that I could give it to him a few days before. For this particular gift, he does need a little bit of advance warning, and I didn’t want to just tell him about it. So I went searching for a handmade journal or small scrapbook thing online and could only come up with one thing that really spoke to me and it was a whopping $160! Um. No. Beside the cost, it was a full journal with 50 pages and all I really needed was about a dozen, if that. I don’t want to write a novel, after all!(...)
Read the rest of A New Appreciation (336 words)

© Nadine for DreamWeaver's Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog, 2009. | Permalink | 11 comments
Post categories: Creativity, Featured, Life, NOT Quilting, Quilting
Tags: papercrafts

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While the plan was still forming though, I spent a lot of time searching around the Internet looking for the best price on Hoffman Bali Pops, and was really happy when a 20% off coupon from Fat Quarter Shop showed up in my inbox at just the right moment. (...)
Read the rest of The Problem with Precuts (766 words)

© Nadine for DreamWeaver's Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog, 2009. | Permalink | 32 comments
Post categories: Creativity, Featured, Quilting, Shows & Contests
Tags: Bali Pops, batik, fabric, precut fabric, show quilts

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I actually wasn’t planning on doing any sort of really scientific side-by-side comparison when I ordered the Jacquard, but after I printed an image on the EQ Printables and was pretty unhappy with the way the ink ran and spread during the rinsing phase, I decided to print the same image on the Jacquard to test it out. And okay, it’s still not a terribly thorough analysis since it’s not like I’m going to burn through three or four more sheets to test different kinds of images on each of these brands, but I think the results are worth sharing anyway.

Here’s the head to head, brutal comparison:(...)
Read the rest of Head to Head: EQ Printables vs. Jacquard Cotton Sheets (579 words)

© Nadine for DreamWeaver's Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog, 2009. | Permalink | 9 comments
Post categories: Creativity, Featured, Musings, Quilting, Tips
Tags: ink jet fabric printing

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Mmmmm, green. If I had to choose a favorite color, it would have to be green. I love, love, LOVE greens! And I had such fun just pulling these few fabrics together, some from my stash, some from the quilt shop, and some I ordered online.

I wanted to have a tree as the center piece of the quilt, and the tree block that I liked the best had half-rectangle triangles, which caused me some issues. I was thinking that you could just make them the same way that half-square triangles are made, by cutting the rectangles, drawing a diagonal line across the middle and sewing ¼” to each side of the drawn line then cutting apart. (...)
Read the rest of Patchwork Tree and Half-Rectangle Triangles (588 words)

© Nadine for DreamWeaver's Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog, 2009. | Permalink | 8 comments
Post categories: Creativity, Featured, Quilting
Tags: cool tools, creative spirit, design, fabric

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Over the years, I’ve used many different methods, so I thought I’d share some of them here over the course of the next few posts. I can’t tell you how many parts this will have, as I’m just going to start with a couple of the methods I used way back when, and work my way through my bag of techniques and tools. Some of what I’ll share I haven’t used recently for one reason or another, but that’s not to say I won’t ever use a particular technique again, and of course someone else might find it useful.

When I was fairly new to quilting, my goal was to not actually mark on the quilt at all if it could be avoided since I was petrified that the marks wouldn’t wash out, so I spent a great deal of time figuring out how to get the quilting pattern on to the quilt without ever touching an actual marker to the fabric. (...)
Read the rest of Quilt Marking Roundup: Stitching Through Paper (628 words)

© Nadine for DreamWeaver's Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments
Post categories: Eye on the Machine, Featured, Quilting, Tips
Tags: machine quilting, quilting paper

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I purchased a couple of wonderful preprinted blocks for free motion quilting from The Quilting Connection in their booth at the Des Moines AQS Quilt Expo. Their newest blocks are printed on lovely batik fabrics, instead of the more common, plain ivory and white fabrics (though I did get one in ivory as well). I’m contemplating using one of these preprints as a kit for my machine quilting class, so of course I wanted to test it out!

(...)
Read the rest of In the Groove, Sort of… (483 words)

© Nadine for DreamWeaver's Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog, 2009. | Permalink | 15 comments
Post categories: Eye on the Machine, Featured, Quilting
Tags: creative spirit, free motion, free motion quilting, machine quilting, thread

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Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent the last year and a half or two years being horribly busy all.the.time., with never enough time to do all the stuff that had to be done, much less all the stuff I wanted to do. So even though I now have some breathing room, I can’t for the life of me figure out what to do with it.

Maybe it’s because I know that there are still so many things I need to be doing right now that I just can’t even figure out which one I should start on. And that’s not taking Christmas or the impending house move into account either.(...)
Read the rest of Motivational Difficulties (399 words)

© Nadine for DreamWeaver's Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog, 2009. | Permalink | 20 comments
Post categories: Featured, Life, Musings, Quilting, Shows & Contests
Tags: AQS, creative spirit, Des Moines, Houston, quilt shows

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I headed toward Des Moines, Iowa for the AQS Quilt Expo on Monday, 26 October after visiting with family in Nevada and Utah since leaving Quilt Festival in Houston. I say “headed toward” since of course, American Airlines couldn’t quite get it together and get me where I needed to go on time and with luggage in hand (for the second time in 10 days, no less)! Those turkeys stranded me in Dallas overnight after flight delays caused me to miss my connecting flight by 10 minutes, and then they wouldn’t give me my stinkin’ luggage! Perhaps they didn’t understand that I’m not the wash’n'wear girl, and never have been. So off I went to some not-so-great hotel near the DFW airport without anything to wear and not even a toothbrush. Yeah, I used to carry all that “what if I get stranded” stuff when I flew, but after 9-11 it all got too painful and I never needed it anyway, so now I don’t. Lesson learned.

I did finally make it to Des Moines a day late, but still in plenty of time for the show. I met so many interesting and FUN people at the show, students, vendors and other quilting professionals alike, that it would be hard to share it all without spending days at it! There were happy students in my classes and they left good evaluations of the classes with AQS, so I think the workshops were pretty successful. Shame on me though: I had my camera with me, but never had time to take any pictures during my classes! Too busy teaching, I guess!(...)
Read the rest of AQS Quilt Expo wrap up (365 words)

© Nadine for DreamWeaver's Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments
Post categories: Featured, Quilting, Shows & Contests
Tags: AQS, Des Moines, Inchie Quilts, Inchies, quilt shows, workshops

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