Just PIN IT!!!

Two years ago I added on to my studio and completely reorganized it, upgrading several aspects of the room.

One of those was to build a larger design wall and then figure out which pins were best to use.

I started out with my normal quilt pins…..round head and flower head……

They were long and thin and didn’t work well at all!!

Next, I bought these “Magic Pins”……

….thinking that the “handle” would be easy to use.

Unfortunately, they were very thin and bent with just the slightest resistance.

Okay….thin pins don’t work, how about short, thicker ones??

I tried these……

…and found that they worked quite well.

The only problem that I had was when I was trying to hold a bunch of layers of fabric on the wall. Then, they would either bend or come loose and the fabrics would topple to the floor.

Last month, I attended a training session for our guild and the instructor mentioned that she used Corsage pins on her design wall……

The heads are large, making them easy to grip.

The pins are long, meaning that they can EASILY hold a bunch of fabric layers

IF they bend, they can easily be straightened out again!!

And they are amazing for holding quilts in place…..

I now believe that I have answered the question of which pins to use on a design wall.

As I said in the title of this post……

JUST……PIN…..IT!!!!

Cutting 60-degree diamonds

Yesterday I was talking about getting organized to make my “Diamond Explosion” quilt and was pleased to find that I could piece the 60-degree diamonds easily.

Now it was time to cut the real fabrics and get started!!

I knew that I could cut the diamonds just using my regular straight ruler….I had done it back in May…..

….but it wouldn’t be as easy since I needed to cut the fabrics one at a time, rather than having them stitched together.

I really like Deb Tucker Rulers and decided to purchase her 60-degree wedge tool…..

Using this tool, I can cut out strips of fabric and then cut the diamonds easily from the strips!!

I settled on a 3-inch finished diamond which meant that my strip was cut 3.5-inches.

The first step was to make the initial cut to start the diamond shape. To do this, I placed the ruler on the strip, being sure that the lines were parallel to the cut edge of the strip…..

A quick slice, and we were ready to go…..

Next, I placed the ruler so that the 6.5-inch mark was at the point I had just created (6.5….because it was 2 times the 3-inch finished size, plus 1/2 inch for the seam allowance)….

Another slice…..

…..and I had a diamond……

As I pieced, I ended up needing some half diamonds and went back to the ruler for those.

In this case, the ruler was placed on the 3.5-inch line……

…..which meant that the top point was missing…..

And, NO….that was not a mistake!!

Having the point clipped off meant that it was SUPER easy to line the piece up when I was ready to sew it in place…..

Once I had a bunch of diamonds cut, I immediately started piecing……

…and then realized that I had other pieces that should have been added BEFORE I sewed these!!!

So, I will leave it here……with seam ripper in hand!!

Come back next week for more of the diamond piecing odyssey!!!

The Painter’s Tape Solution

In yesterday’s post, I described my newest piecing project…. a charity quilt using the “Whirlpool” block…..

I did make one change in the piecing layout. Instead of piecing the diamond blocks as two half-square triangle squares, I decided to piece them as one unit made up of a rectangle of the scrap fabric and two triangles of the background fabric…..

I was piecing these using the “snowball” technique where you place a background square at the end of the rectangle, sew on the diagonal, and press the resulting triangle over to finish the rectangle.

BUT, I was having trouble getting my lines to be straight!!

After some thought, I figured out a solution……

After I figured out how to position the tape, it was fast and easy to finish piecing the 80 required rectangles and get on with the design.

What would quilters do without Painter’s Tape!!!!

Do you have a favorite trick for using this special tool??

Prewound Bobbins….yea or nay??

I HATE to wind bobbins, especially when I am in the middle of a project and have to stop and unthread everything.

I have recently been hearing people talking about pre-wound bobbins and my initial, frugal reaction was “why would I want to spend money on those?”

THEN, I started thinking about the fact that I would have been paying money for the thread anyway, and what I was saving was TIME, and we all know how valuable IT is!!

So, I relaxed my purse strings and purchased two sets of Pre-wound bobbins for Julio, my Juki Sit-Down long arm……

I loaded a cream-colored one into the bobbin casing and started quilting……

Okay….the top looks GREAT!!!

But the BIG test is how the back looks…..

WOW….even on this loose-weaved practice fabric, the tension looks amazing.

I think that I have found a keeper!!!

So where are you…..Prewound Bobbins………

Quilting tool with a story!!

Like most quilters, I cannot live without my rotary cutter!!

But even more than that, I love the story surrounding my first rotary cutter…….

Let me set the stage for you…..

It is December of 1985 and my husband and I have traveled from Canberra Australia and are visiting our parents in Abilene, Texas. And, more importantly to them, we have a 6-month old grandson in tow!!

My ever-resourceful Father bought us a Polaroid camera and said that he wanted to be a member of the “picture of the month club”!! The idea is that we would mail one photo each month so that he could see his grandson grow up. Remember, this was LONG before the digital age!!!

The day before we left to return to Canberra, Dad took me to a discount store to purchase more film for the camera. As we walked past the craft department, a package similar to this one caught my eye…..