Happy Valentine's Day

I love making little dresses for little girls, especially one as sweet as Miss Emelia. And what could be any sweeter than Valentine Conversation Hearts for a special little Valentine Girl.

I used a basic button shoulder jumper pattern, size 2, adding about an inch to the front and back shoulder tabs because Emelia is tiny but a little tall for her age.

The machine embroidered conversation hearts were created using a bought heart from Embroidery Library. The original just had "Cute Pie" but I wanted more than one heart on her dress and I wanted other sentiments. Using Babylock Palette V8, I duplicated the single candy heart design three times and changed the thread colors. I repositioned the hearts, rotating them to make a little grouping of candies.


Then I separated each design by color, removing the original words. I typed in other appropriate Valentine candy heart sentiments, like "Be Mine," "So Sweet," and "Love You" using the very small text option in the embroidery software. With a little trial and error, the words were easy to fit within the candy heart designs and stitched out beautifully on the red trigger fabric.

Looks like Little Miss Emelia loves her Happy Valentine's Day dress from her Nana. She's a very sweet little Valentine Girl.

Flowering Heart Quilt

Several months ago, maybe even a year or so, I picked out fabric for the Flowering Heart Quilt from Angie's Bits & Pieces. Now that I'm on a binge of trying to use up stash and finish long neglected projects, I decided to work on this quilt again.

After gathering up a pile of red and white scraps

and printing the templates on no-show mesh(embroidery stabilizer),

I finally started piecing the blocks.

Whew! There's some tiny little pieces in those hearts.

Binding's Finished! Scrappy Patchy Heart Resumed!

Finished sewing the binding around the Horse Quilt this morning. All the threads are trimmed, knots secured and little stray strings removed. It's too cold and rainy to go to the post office today so the Horse Quilt will be on its way to Oregon come Monday.

Now to get back to the Scrappy Patchy Heart. My sister, Barbara, asked me to piece a queen size top for her to hand quilt so her son and daughter will have something to fight over after she's gone. Just kidding! She is a hand quilter where I prefer to take advantage of any and all new technology when it comes to sewing. We decided on the Scrappy Patchy Heart block because, together, we had a ton of scraps that needed to be put to good use. I did order the strips for the ribbons from Connecting Threads.
Here's her top-in-progress as I'm playing with the layout to keep from having too similar blocks next to each other.

The block pattern came from a friend on one of my quilting internet groups. She had nice graphics and well-written cutting and sewing instructions for one block but I decided to re-create the block in Electric Quilt 7 so I could lay out the whole quilt and know just how much fabric I would need for the backgrounds, ribbons and setting triangles.
Below is a close-up of the Scrappy Patchy Heart block.

Now if I decided to make the hearts using matchy instead of scrappy fabrics, I'll know perzactly how much to buy. Since the patches are all 2.5" inches, this would be a great project for those rolls of coordinating fabrics. I think I feel a Connecting Threads order coming on!

Horse Quilt Off The Frame!

I finally got the horse quilt off the quilting frame. I suspect it had been on there at least 6 months, maybe longer. I spent a good part of yesterday and last evening squaring up the quilt and trimming the threads. With individual little quilting elements in all the different sections of the blocks, that was a lot of trimming. My plan is to bind it today and get it in the mail by the weekend. I know Sheri will be surprised (and pleased, I hope) to finally get it back!

It wasn't easiest thing to quilt. The quilt top is flannel and the dimensional piecing made positioning the quilting machine foot a challenge, particularly over the areas where many seams converged.

Now is's done and I'm pleased. I think I'l load up some plain ol' fabric and just play with the quilting machine for a while now. I'll try not to notice that box of 6 or 7 tops waiting their turns on the frame.

Banana Nut Muffins - Yummmmm

Since three bananas were on the verge of turning into a dark brown blob hanging on the fruit basket, I figured today would be a good day to replenish the freezer with tiny little Banana Nut Muffins.

They make a delicious easy breakfast or tea break with very little effort. Just spread the frozen muffins on a piece of foil, pop 'em in a cold oven, turn it on about 300-350 degrees. While the coffee is brewing or the tea is steeping, the muffins will warm up nicely. Yummmm.



I think I'll go have one, or two, right now. But maybe you'd like the recipe? I'm not one to follow any guidelines exactly as intended. Be it a recipe or a pattern for a quilt or dress, I have to do a little personal adjustment here and there. So, here's my not-so-original-but-adapted-by-me

Banana Nut Mini Muffin Recipe
(Makes 48 mini muffins)
Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Spray mini muffin pans with non-stick spray.
1 1/2 cups plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg

Sift all the above together and set aside.

3 large ripe bananas, mashed
1 tsp lemon juice
3/4 cup sugar
1 large egg
1/3 cup melted butter
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 chopped pecans or walnuts (optional)

Mix mashed bananas with lemon juice then combine with sugar, egg, melted butter and vanilla in a large bowl. Stir in flour mixture till smooth and add nuts.
Drop into prepared muffin pans.

Bake in preheated oven about 12 minutes, more or less, till golden brown. I test a center muffin with a toothpick. When it comes out clean, they're done!

When the muffins are all cool and we've eaten all we want for the day, I freeze a dozen at a time in quart size freezer bags, sucking out the air with the hand pump thingy.
Enjoy!

Little Dress Panto

I think I've found a new obsession. I've been having so much fun playing with creating an embroidery design in PEDesign/Palette Version 8 and, through a series of steps, converting the embroidery to a format that can be sewn on my Babylock Jewel quilting machine.

Here's the little dress embroidery design as it was created in PED/PAL V8.



And here it is as a pantograph, ready for the computer to tell the Jewel to quilt it across the quilt. Click on the image to see it much better.


Here's the second embroidery design I did. I call it Puff Sleeve Dress. And below it is the panto, ready for the quilting machine. Click on the image for a better view.




This is just too much fun for a cool Sunday afternoon. I think I'll have to clean off the quilting machine/frame and just give this a test stitching!

Getting Back To It

Well it looks like I need to get back to blogging!

Sharon (the Quilt Didio) suggested the members of Jewels in Motion keep blogs to share our quilting ideas and projects using the Babylock Jewel and Crown Jewel as well as the QuiltMotion software.

I'll have dig around and find some pictures of quilts I've made. Surely there's a few somewhere. How 'bout this one to start. I made this for my sister, Margaret, who loves cats. It was a lot of fun to make and everyone loves it.