Quilt As You Go, Simply Done

Simply Done

Marguerita’s Blog

Inspiration!

by

I love inspiration! I get it from quilt shows, group chats and PEOPLE! I meet a lot of people online and I love that so much – I *love* getting emails from new and old friends 🙂

I also read a lot of books (paper and and electronic). I’ve read Jack Canfield’s books The Aladdin Factor, Goals, The Success Principles. They gave me great inspiration and I re-read them regularly, but on the recommendation of a friend, I bought Book Yourself Solid.

I am hoping to do some traveling and teaching in the future and this book is helping me in that goal as well as sparking some great ideas! (I’m also reading online A Brief Guide to World Domination.)

Alaskans in my area are keeping a weather eye on our erupting volcano, Mt. Redoubt. This is a webcam aimed at the building lava dome.

Redoubt is a pain in the neck. She’s disrupting air travel and making everyone up here nervous about ash and winds and more ash. {I was very tempted to call her a pain in the ash!} But, I never argue with Mother Nature, she gives me the best inspiration of all! What inspires you? What do you read for inspiration?

My Sewing Studio

by

Right now my studio is a 9′ x 11′ bedroom and I share it with a very spoiled pet rabbit. The rabbit doesn’t live in a cage, he goes wherever he wants in the house and he believes that the room belongs to him. He lets me in for a while but if I stay too long he nips at me. Then I lock him out 🙂 {See that wire gate behind him?} After about half an hour, I let him back in again and he settles down and lays on the carpet by my feet. This wall has my pegboard with rulers, patterns and anything else I can get to stay on a hook. You can see my cutting table and the storage bins under it, my folding table and some old ironing boards. I used to use them to prop up big quilts before I “invented” my cheap sewing table 🙂

In this photo you see my lighting and tripod and backdrop for videotaping. Behind the quilt top {Sarahs} are the shelves we built into the closet, after taking the closet doors off. For lighting on the ceiling I have a couple of 4′ long florescent fixtures with daylight rated bulbs and I love that. When lighting for video, I use the portable closet rack that you see here, with some clamp lamps that have daylight rated bulbs in them. The brown sewing desk is a recent purchase that houses a vintage Kenmore – and what a find it was! Fantastic stitching and cams that I can’t wait to try out.

On this wall are my buckets of scraps, color sorted, and a couple of small tables with threads, bobbins, old Kenmore and bobbin winder among the clutter. In here we have stripped out the old carpet and I primed and painted the floor with a gorgeous milk-chocolate color floor paint. This room is eventually going to become a spare bedroom {Audrey’s Room when she visits grandma?} with maybe some of the coloring and drawing supplies on the shelf. Then she will have to share it with Bunny. Won’t that be fun?!

On the next wall I have a small design wall stapled to the drywall. I have a few small tops pinned to it, reminding me that they need to be quilted. The bins have my threads, sorted by color and by thread type, the rayons are in the top bins and the cottons in the small bottom bins and in the lowest bins are ribbons, interfacing and other miscellaneous sewing items. My cutting table is covered with stuff and the bins below it have unfinished projects or else fabrics (there are 4 bins total under there).

Next we make a trip upstairs, to the top of the garage, which has been unheated and partially insulated. I’ve stored rolls of batting up there and other miscellaneous odds and ends, and Tom used it for all of the boat soft gear (sleeping bags, raingear, etc.) as well as years of accumulated family clutter.

Now he’s working hard on fixing some problems up there, adding walls, and I’ve been cleaning, sorting, moving stuff and painting. Here’s what one wall looked like before we got started. We work on it between other tasks around the house. When this project is complete I hope to move all my sewing and quilting things up here!

So, there you have it! I invite you to check out some other sewing studios using the link at the top right of my blog and also at Quilt Videos.

If you see anything in the photos that you are curious about, just post a comment or email me and I’d be happy to tell you what it is or why it’s there. Also, there are a few things missing – -my sewing table is in the living room right now, along with the machine that I use the most, my Bernina 180. Thank you very much for reading my blog 🙂

Meet Susan

by

I met Susan through a Yahoo group that I belong to (Stashbusters) and I liked her from the first few lines of her post:

“I just wanted to share what I’ve been doing with some of the scraps members have been sending me. This Quilt of Valor has scraps from New York, Louisiana, Montana, Indiana and Ohio! How cool is that–put together for one Soldier.”

If you follow the link to her blog you will see that she also loves (and made!) one of the Confetti Quilts and hers is gorgeous!

I have met some great quilters and wonderful people on the internet and I’d like to introduce some of them to you too. I think you might like them 🙂

Imaginary Friends

by

I just about peed my pants when I saw this! I need some imaginary friends – doesn’t everyone?

Friend Feed is the “new” place to be, and if I can create imaginary friends there, well, why write another novel?

I find some interesting stuff on this internet – and I *love* the stuff that makes me laugh, makes me think and teaches me something new. I’ll share a few favorites with you in the upcoming weeks.

Meanwhile, I’ll be over on Friend Feed having some tea and scones with my imaginary friends 🙂

Come join us, won’t you?

var addthis_pub=”margueritam”;
Bookmark and Share

Spring Cleaning!

by

We are at it again! This is part of the ongoing saga of a small (poorly insulated) house in Alaska and my never ending love of changing things. It is only slightly quilting related because I *may* be moving my quilting stuff to another part of the house soon (as in: out of the living room, bedroom and garage 🙂

We started with a “sort out” of stuff that’s been untouched since dinosaurs roamed Alaska, and have moved on to insulating. Have I ever mentioned how much I hate fiberglass insulation? I love the foamboard insulation (as you might have seen in my Cheap Sewing & Quilting Table Tutorial) but oh how I hate fiberglass! I start itching the minute I even *think* about fiberglass!

I’ve insulated before, helping friends, then insulated my two cabins that I bought (and sold) here in Seward, and slowly we’ve been insulating Tom’s old house. See me covered head to toe when I was doing one of the cabins? LOL! A (former) friend had promised to come help me and never showed, so I did it all myself, from ceiling to walls, and vapor barrier too. The folks at the local home improvement store know me by name! I propped my little camera up on a stump and put the self timer on to take this pic – I was so proud of myself for getting that job done!

Have you gotten the spring cleaning bug?

Book Giveaway for Easy Applique Blocks

by


My pal Kay Mackenzie asked if I would like to be included in her internet Book Tour and I jumped at the chance!

What is so cool about going to Quilt Market and meeting other designers and authors is learning that they are just nice quilters, like every other quilter 🙂

Kay sent me a peek inside and an autographed book to give away! All you have to do to enter is [Contest ended April 4th – check back soon for the next one] I’ll announce the winner here on April 4th and I will email the winner too 🙂 {you won’t be getting spam from me, I promise!}

Her book has the wonderful applique designs that you see here and also has a CD! As I flipped through her book the first thing that came to my mind was “homey”. Her designs and her quilts have that comforting feel that just says “home”. You’ll love this book 🙂

You. Can. Do. It.

by

You. You know who you are!

Can. Able, capable, willing, knowledgeable.

Do. Accomplish, achieve, attain, succeed.

It. Everything, anything, exactly what you want.

Spring in Seward, Alaska

by

Yes, this is spring in Alaska. See the pretty flowers; the sunshine? Me neither! LOL Someone please remind me why I live here?


If you look closely you can see Tan Bunny just to the right of the feeder that Tom built. It sits across the alley from his house, on Barb’s property. She loves rabbits too, so she said it was okay to put the feeder there. Bunnies love her big trees 🙂

Machine Quilting – How to Stitch in the Ditch

by

Here they are! I went with the two-part format because I felt that there was just too much information that I had to cut in order to meet the 10 minute limit for YouTube (not criticizing, just explaining) so:

Part One – – –
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiJllrOdrZ4&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

I would love to know what you think!! So far I have only remembered one thing that I should have said – and that is “don’t buy cheap pins”. I did this once and totally regret it, it was a waste of time and money because I had to go BACK to the store and buy the good (expensive) ones just to get them to go through 2 layers of fabric and a needled batting. Better to just buy the good ones up front and avoid the frustration and waste of having a bag full of useless pins.

Please let me know what you think of the videos and of quilting a large quilt at home on your sewing machine. Do you stitch-in-the-ditch? Do you do things differently than me?

If you found this useful, please share it with your friends 🙂

var addthis_pub=”margueritam”;
Bookmark and Share