The observant reader will realize this isn’t actually a quilt; it’s a quilt top. I will not have time for quilting before Valentines Day, but I want to enjoy it, so I pinned it to the front of another quilt and hung it up over my fireplace. My goal is to get it quilted by next year. In the meantime, it makes me happy to look at it. The picture makes me feel a little sentimental for another reason. Most of the items shown are special because of their personal associations – my husband made the fireplace for me, the framed Scripture is a gift from a friend, my granddaughter created a few of the items, my mother decoupaged and painted the birdhouse, and I was shopping with her when I found all those little sisal birds and the hedgehog, too! On top of the piano I have pictures of family members, a cross-stitched sampler from a niece, and a beautiful box I purchased while shopping with an old friend – our one visit in over ten years, and we spent much of it at JoAnn Fabrics! I don’t collect a lot of things that don’t have that kind of Read More
Tag: serial novel
Don’t Quit Your Day Job
That’s usually good advice for an aspiring novelist, but my day job isn’t all that profitable, either. I teach quiltmaking. I have been teaching for twenty years, and I love it. Teaching is something that blesses me. I also make quilts for sale on etsy or by commission and do some custom dressmaking. Although I learned to sew clothing over forty years ago, I didn’t take up quiltmaking until I was pregnant with my second child. That first quilt was very sweet, with pink and blue lambs on a muslin background. I appliqued the lambs with a zigzag stitch on my sewing machine and used a puffy batting. I decided I enjoyed quiltmaking and started looking for more information. We were living in a tiny farming town in Germany, and it was hard to find calico fabric in the local stores. The Air Force Base Exchange had some fabric, although none of it matched, and they had something even more interesting: a rotary cutter. There weren’t many quilting books in the base library, and they were all too old-fashioned (I was 24), so I used graph paper and colored pencils to design a little wall quilt to insulate the bathroom Read More