Welcome to Quilting is in My Blood
Hi, I’m Mary, and I’m still a relatively new quilter who NEEDS a positive outlet like quilting to counterbalance the sometimes very difficult (though often rewarding) work I do as a mental health therapist. I preach self-care to all my clients, and for many years, making mosaics was how I decompressed from hard, draining days. If you want to know more about my mosaic work, check out my quilting in glass post. Now that I’ve been bitten by the quilting bug, my mosaic supplies are gathering dust, and my fabric stash and quilting supplies are taking over!
The title of my blog is to honor my mother, Cleo, who was equally passionate about quilting. I’m sure I disappointed her that I had no interest in quilting while she was alive (and groaned when we had to stop at ANOTHER fabric store), but I’m definitely making up for lost time. Earlier this year, my sister sent me a couple of her unfinished quilt tops along with some of her fabric stash, and I look forward to finishing these quilts to share with other family members who love my mom’s quilting as much as I do.
I’m thrilled to participating in the New Quilt Bloggers group hosted by Yvonne@Quilting Jetgirl, Cheryl@Meadow Mist Designs, and Terri Ann@Childlike Fascination. They all have been fantastic blogging mentors, and you should take a few minutes to check out their quilts. These women know what they are doing! There are over 70 of us new bloggers partipating, so we’ve been broken up into four different hives led by the four hosts which provides a greater level of support. I am fortunate to have Cheryl as my hive leader, and I’m learning even more from her by participating in her Midnight Mystery Quilt-a-long.
My Quilts
I’ve been quilting for almost nine months. The first quilt I completed in March ’15 was for my modern cowgirl friend (positives and lessons learned blogged about here).
In April ’15, I finished my second quilt AFTER I had my first quilting meltdown (blogged about here).
The quilt I feel the best about is my Everyday Quilt. It was my first quilting project started in Oct ’14 but not completed until May ’15. It’s the only quilt I’ve kept so far (blogged about here).
I tell my friend at work, Beverly, who is an accomplished quilter that I’m not in Quilt Kindergarten any more. I suppose Confident Beginner is the best classification for me. I’m even taking a seven-evening beginner quilt class at my local quilt store, Threadbear, partly to support a friend who wants to learn how to quilt (and I don’t want to teach her!) and partly to fill in some of my own gaps since much of my quilt education has been trying a variety of tutorials online. The same day that I signed up for the class at Threadbear, I registered for an intermediate quilting class that will start at the end of August at the local community college. I did email the instructor to make sure I’d understood her correctly when I met her last fall that she welcomes quilters of all proficiency levels.
I’m also EXTREMELY excited about going to QuiltCon in February, but I may have signed up for too many workshops. I plan to take Thursday during the day to go some lectures before my first workshop, and Friday is a light day, but then there’s Saturday and Sunday morning:). I’d love to know who else is going.
I do have some interests besides quilting–honest I do!
My favorite vacation spot is Kauai. I went there last year with my family, and I often think of the saturated colors in Kauai which were such a contrast to the muted colors of the northern New Mexico high desert where I live.
Books over Movies: I tend to read more than watch movies but on my vacation last month, I really enjoyed watching The Book Thief. I belong to a women’s book group, and we read the book a couple years ago. I thought the movie did the book justice which in my opinion is unusual.
Something unusual about me is that I am a die-hard San Francisco Giants fan and not just because they have won three World Series championships in the last five years. I’ve been going to games in San Francisco for fifty years. I remember seeing Willie Mays and Willie McCovey play, and I saw Hank Aaron hit one of his 755 home runs. I regularly watch games on my iPad on MLB TV and am as much of a fan of the Giants’ TV announcers, Kruk and Kuip, as I am of the players. I usually have a game on when I’m quilting and look up when I hear the roar of the crowd or the announcers sounding excited.
A blogging tip I’d like to share from my limited blogging experience is to copy and paste the codes for your blog buttons in a separate electronic file. I’ve written an email to myself that I keep in draft form, and I keep adding the code for buttons as I add buttons to my blog. The reason I do this is because when I switched from one Word Press theme to another, I lost all my blog buttons and had to start from scratch gathering the button codes.
I just learned a really cool quilting tip from Ann, the owner at Threadbear. She taught me how to use two rulers to rotary cut fabric if you have your cutting table against a wall like I have at home. How I was taught to cut my fabric with a rotary cutter is to fold the fabric in half and square up the right edge of the fabric, then walk around the table, and place the ruler down to start cutting strips of fabric. But if you can’t walk around your table and you want to cut for example a two-inch wide strip of fabric, you line up your ruler two-inches from the right side of the fabric:
Then you place your long ruler right against the short ruler:
And then carefully pull away the short ruler, and you are ready to cut your two-inch strip without having to walk around your cutting table or flipping around the material.
Now I have a question for you: how important do you think it is to sew a scant quarter-inch seam? I’m still sewing with a quarter-inch presser foot with a guide but am thinking of taking the training wheels off in the future, so I can start developing proficiency with a scant 1/4-inch seam.
Please check out the other bloggers in my hive who are participating in this week’s blog hop:
Abby@Hashtag Quilt
Shelley@The Carpenter’s Daughter Who Quilts
Megan@Sew Stitching Cute Quilts
Quilting is in my Blood 