Archie, Squiggy, Little Monkey and Temperature

It's been a productive week. I made class samples after prepping for my trip to California. Here is Little Monkey, an easy quilt for a baby or child, and it uses lots of scraps:

Eventually, this quilt will have 24 blocks and two borders. This is as much as I could get done this week. It's a free pattern from Bonnie Hunter, find it on her Blog. The class will be March 8, 2018, from 1-4 p.m. at Barb's Sewing Center, Huntsville, AL. 256-539-2414.

There are new rulers, better referred to as templates, for free-motion quilting with rulers on a domestic or longarm machine. Designed by Angela Walters for Creative Grids, they have the magic grippy stuff on the outside edge of the bottom of these rulers, it holds the ruler firmly in place as you stitch around it with a ruler foot:

I used two of them, Archie and Squiggy, to create a Ruler Work sample for demo sessions I'll be doing at Barb's Sewing Center, February 16, 2018, 10 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. I'll be using the Bernina Q20 in the shop, showing several designs for ruler work. Instead of just "practice sandwiches" I am making placemats for my kitchen. The light side is just muslin, the dark side is a dark blue multi-print--that will be the side we eat on. I find I do better stitching if I know people will actually see how I stitched:

The other quilt project I started this year is a 2018 Temperature Quilt--Google it, it's a thing. It started in knitting and crocheting but I saw two quilts online that inspired me to make one. The idea is you assign a fabric to various temperature ranges and use the daily high (or low, I suppose) for the location you want to use and make a quilt with those fabrics, one piece for each day. Here is my first 2 weeks of 2018 for Huntsville, AL and the fabric chart I made:

The rectangles are cut 1.5" x 4.75", there are 7 in each row and there will be 52 rows. The quilt will be 29.75" x 52" before borders, a weird size. We'll see as the year goes on. You can do any size pieces you want. The other decision to make is do you use only one location, like where you live, or do you use the physical location you are at each day?  I'm sticking with Huntsville to keep it easy.

One of the fine women in the Sunday Sew and Sews class gave me a lovely gift she made for me:

The stitching is beautiful, she even used metallic thread to "stitch in the ditch". I hung it up immediately in a spot where I will see it every day. Thank you, Cindy! Those are the extras that make teaching quilting so rewarding. Students often become friends.

Time to pack my bags and get on the Road to California.

Let's quilt!

Barbara