Holy Thursday

I, your Lord and Master, now become your servant.

I who made the moon and stars will kneel to wash your feet.

This is my commandment to love as I have loved you.

Kneel to wash each other's feet as I have done for you.

Hexie Weekend

Back in the 90s, I bought some die-cut hearts to make my DDIL a quilt.  I decided to raw edge applique them to the blocks I was making and then sew around their edges.  The normal way is the iron on fusible interfacing to the fabric, then trace the shapes and lastly cut them out. I couldn't follow the normal sequence of steps with these already cut pieces. I had to come up with an idea to make them fusible, and I did.

For one of my current hexie projects, I have these leaves I want to add to the top.  I cut them out and fussed with them to finally find where I wanted to put them around each hexie flower, and then I was going to cut them for the method above. However, I quickly realized I didn't have enough scraps of green to cut them one more time.  That's when I thought of those hearts again.  Here is how I solved my problem then and now:

1.  First I got a piece of paper towel. On it I placed the leaves face down on the towel.

2.  Then I cut a square of steam-a-seam 2 and placed it over the leaves, and fused it on. (about 5 secs)

 3. With a light source behind the sandwich illuminating the leaves, I carefully cut them out (leaf on left). Then I removed the paper towel layer from the leaf and cut off any fusible I could see while it was backlighted. (middle leaf).  Then I removed the paper and my leaf was ready to fuse in place (leaf on right).

4. Here are the leaves already fused and ready to machine stitch.  Problem solved.

The winner of last week's 100 paper piecing pieces is the Animated Librarian!  I've sent her an email for her address so  I can send them to her.  Thanks for all of you who linked up your eye candy.

I was going to have another giveaway this Friday, however, I've been commissioned to make a quilt and am going to take a break from blogging for a month or so to get it done on time.  I need all the time I can get with all the other things I have to do.  So if you don't hear from me, that's what I'm doing in between babysitting and everything else.  So I leave you for now asking the Lord to send you blessings, life treats you gently, you have time to quilt and your Guardian Angels look after you.

Applique Tuesday

Well, I did it - got the border that is Part 5 of my Soupçon variation done!  Here it is:

I learned something with this part. Firstly, I can't seem to make templates that are the right size.  I downloaded Karen's page for these diamonds. I checked the size and they were an oh so tiny smidgen small. So I went with them. Then I traced them on card stock studier than paper, but not by much. Then I cut them out and glue basted to make my diamonds. Then I laid out the top row to see how they fit on the line I drew as directed by Karen. They were too big!  How could this be? They fit when they were just templates and the hexie flower.

I took one of the small diamonds and put it on top of one of the templates on the sheet. It was bigger! Here's how it added up. Since they were a tad small to begin with, I cut just outside the line to make the paper templates.  Then I laid them on the fabric and cut my piece 1/4" bigger. I glue basted them. And there lay the problem. By cutting right outside the line or even in the middle of the line, I added 1/32nds to the pattern. Then when I glued the fabric around the template, I added another 1/32nd - 1/16th to the measurement. With all the pieces, I added a whopping 1/4" or more to the total length of the templates, and thus they didn't fit. Moral of story for me is cut inside the drawn line when cutting out templates. Because of my leaves, I still had to add a little curve to my corners, but I like them.

So how's your project coming?  Leave me a comment, and I'll come by and see what lovely you have working on. I'm linking to Esther's WOW and Connie's Linky Tuesday Party - lots of goodies there.

Bye for now - take care!