Teacher Pillow Torment


I finished piecing all of the blocks, which is great. Above are the block for the Principal and the Assistant Principal, who are both retiring. It is the same block, but Around the Block shows it separately with different names, apparently because the colors go in different places.


My next problem is borders. I made 12″ blocks and bought 14″ pilow forms (aside from the fact that Around the Block does not cover 14″ blocks, what was I thinking???**). As a result, I need to add borders in order to increase the overall size of the blocks. Above is a possible border for the Asst. Principal’s block. It wasn’t my idea, but I like it. It really sets off the cross.


This is what I have already added to the Resource Teacher’s block. I love the dots; they are cheerful (raise your hand if you knew that was coming!).

The good is that part of the back is done. The bad, however, is that now the torment starts. For some reason, I was unable to measure once I got past making the blocks. I wanted to add 3″ borders to the Resource Teacher (RT) block. I got one side that was 3″, two sides at 4″ and one side at 2 7/8″ HUH? I don’t know what is going on with me and this project. As I detailed my sad tale of woe to St. JCN, she said that I had to make this my last year of making Teacher Pillows and if I didn’t she would torment me next year! Dear me! I don’t know what I will do next year, but I have been warned.

Part of what I am doing is trying to get it right: be able to make these in my sleep. It doesn’t seem to be happening and maybe St. JCN is correct in that I should go out in a blaze of glory with these five pillows. We’ll see.

I am taking the week off and then will work on these on Sunday.

**Actually I was thinking about how many extra borders I had to add last year so I wanted to make sure I had enough slack to cut off, if I need it.

I Guess I Do Have a Project

I have been feeling sort of at loose ends since I finished my various projects and took them to the quilter. I can’t decide if I should start the Chocolate Box quilt or just putter around. It finally dawned on me that I do have a project: the Teacher Pillows!

I don’t know what I was thinking, but these Teacher Pillows have turned into a production. This year, I am making 5: 3 for the child’s teachers and one each for the principal and assistant principal, who are both retiring. The latter two are not expected and not as important IMO, though I would like to make the gesture. On the positive side, I decided to start early and make them so I could take my time. The blocks are almost all done, with a minimum of unsewing.

Teacher pillow. This one is done with the Denyse Schmidt fabrics and came out very well, if I do say so. I love the colors and can’t wait to work more with these fabrics.


Teacher aide pillow


Resource teacher pillow. I had to make sure I have enough fabric, because this teacher will be working with the child until 8th grade. She will have a set of pillows by the time the child graduates! I really hope she likes the colors we have chosen.


Principal pillow. The child calls her the Wizard of Oz.


Assistant principal pillow.

I went through two books to see how I could make the rest of the pillow covers so they don’t have Gap-osis in the back. I am thinking of slip stitching them shut so I don’t have to worry about it. The recipients wouldn’t be able to wash the covers, though.

And on other fronts….

The fabric from eQuilter arrived. More dots!


I also worked a bit on the Flowering Snowball (Cross Block). Here is my first test of the new template and some fun [Denyse Schmidt] fabrics. I have since cut a lot of the corner pieces. I cut a piece whenever I have a piece of fabric out. I really need to get some more whites.


This is my wreck of a design wall. There are pieces of fabric and blocks everywhere. The little progress I made on the Cross Blocks (Flowering Snowball) is in the lower left corner. The blocks for the Teacher Pillows are stacked and pinned to the design wall (lower middle). I have no more space and am seriously thinking about what I can do to expand this space. First, I will move the Pineapple blocks up a few inches. That should help. Second, I will finish these Teacher Pillows, which should give me some breathing room. Something must be done, though, as this kind of design wall makes me crazy. I can’t think when it is so full.

Slight Deviation from the Quiltmaking Norm

I spent the day at my friend’s, Single Scrapbooker*, house working on my photo albums. I have been reading scrapbook magazines to get ideas for color schemes for my quilts. Most of the layouts are too complicated for me. I need to get the photos in the albums fast. However, I have been inspired by the layering and detail work. You can replicate some of the ideas in quiltimaking by getting inspiration from the colors, using beads and machine applique’ (or any kind of applique’, I suppose).

I tried creating a page yesterday based on some of the ideas I was seeing. It doesn’t have flair that layouts in the articles have. Still, I like the layout and am pleased with the way it turned out.

*SS has not updated her blog in awhile, but said she got a lot of great ideas yesterday, so I hope she does. She is a good writer and very thorough in her analysis .

Quick Sewing for the Holidays

Whew! A major project is over with today and now I feel like I can breathe with no guilt.

Last weekend (when I was breathing WITH guilt) I stopped for awhile and made some gift bags. Every year I make some new ones in addition to the ones we use from previous years. Each year some are given away and we get some new ones from other family members who make them. All of mine are in storage so I have to make a bunch this year or else, God forbid, wrap gifts in wrapping paper. Bleah!

Gift bags are GREAT for the following reasons:
1. No buying gift paper or tape. This saves time, money and energy!
2. You get to use all that quilting fabric you bought for that Christmas quilt you never got around to making.
3. Easy to wrap.
4. Easy to rewrap. If the gift tag falls off, just untie the ribbon, look in the bag and put a new gift tag on it.
5. You get to see your cool fabric over and over each year.
6. Wrapping gifts takes half the time. (Yes, you have to make the bags, which takes time, but once that is over with – and you were going to sew anyway, right? – gift wrapping is easy.)
7. You can get lots of Christmas fabric on sale after Christmas inexpensively.
8. You can use this idea for any gift giving holiday.
9. Your friends and family will be impressed.
10. Use up fabric you won’t use in a quilt, but still like.
11. GREAT for those large conversationals.
12. Quick to make.
13. You don’t have to wash the fabric, because the sizing gives body to the fabric.
14. Great way to try out different embellishments and stitches using your fancy machine.

For those of you who love to wrap gifts, don’t make these. For everyone else: make a bunch and impress all of your friends.

Creative Effort of the Week


The shower on Sunday was, by all accounts, a big success. The shower ended at 5pm and everyone was gone by 5:10, however, including the guest of honor, so I am not so sure.

The delight to the left is my creative effort of the week. I saw an article in the SF Chronicle a few weeks ago and knew it was the perfect thing for the party. Apparently, cupcake cakes are all the rage these days. I read that people are even using them instead of wedding cakes. The theory is that they inject a dose of fun into the event, are easy to eat and bring people’s senses back to when they were children. Very interesting!

The quilt squares were also a big success. More on those when I can post the photos. I am pleased to say that nobody complained about not be able to draw and some lovely squares were produced.


Otherwise, I have been buying, receiving and washing fabric. St. JCN is coming for a visit. Saint, I say, because she offered (I did ask!) to iron about 3 million yards of fabric that I have bought and never washed. Talk about a true friend!!! In preparation for this miracle, I have started to wash it. This was the first load. As you can see, there is plethora of dots and icky green.


The dots are for the Thoughts on Dots piece that I have been fiddling with. As you can see I have cut more squares. Some of the fabrics I added are from the washing pile. I did press some of them on my own.

This picture is a great example of what I was talking about when I mentioned heavy and light. I have a theory that no fabric is set in stone until the quilt is quilted and the entire quilt has the binding on. I have been known to take apart a back in order to get a piece of fabric out of it. At the moment I am trying out these pieces. I want this piece to look like sherbet… light and fluffy, perhaps a bit foofy; happy. NOT rainy. NOT depressing. The Terri Mangat fabric in the middle is dots, but it might be too heavy. As well, the green dots on the left next to the light aqua Kaffe Fassett design. The fabrics with the white backgrounds are also an issue. I don’t want the viewer’s eye drawn to the white. I do love the fabrics, though, so I will play with placement quite a bit before I decide. I have a feeling that whether they stay or go depends on the amount of yellow I put into the piece. We’ll have to see as I cut more fabrics.


Since, after washing that first load of fabric, I seem to have nearly every dot known to quilters-kind, I have no business buying more. Too bad TDOTNB drove me to shop online. I received the first shipment a few days ago and as you can see: more dots. These are not washed yet, but hopefully will be this weekend.

I also got a squares pack of April Cornell’s Poetry Collection. I felt that my other attempt at sewing a whole collection of squares together was very successful. I loved the fabrics in the Poetry Collection, but didn’t feel that I wanted yardage. This was a good solution. I haven’t sewn them together yet, but will do it soon. Who knows? Perhaps another table runner is in my future!

It occurred to me that I am getting so many dot fabrics with white backgrounds that I may just have to make one of these 6.5″ squares quilts with all dot fabrics with white backgrounds. It is a thought. I don’t want to bore myself, though. Such a limited project may drive, even me, batty.

Go to your studio and make stuff!

Napkins in process

I spent some of Friday and Saturday trimming and sewing napkins. I have seven sewn and ready to press and topstitch. I don’t know why I don’t have eight, but I don’t.

The fronts are made of various food and food related fabrics. The backs are made from Michael Miller’s fabric with the 1950s family and their funny comments like “Thanks honey, mother will never taste the arsenic”. DS thinks the fabric is hilarious.

I did the first round of sewing (FQ right sides together, sew around the edge with a straight stitch leaving an opening slightly larger than your hand, turn inside out press). I am now at the pressing stage.

This pressing stage is always a pain, because no matter what I do the are where the stitching is wants to collapse in towards where the raw edges of sam seam are. Sigh.

I have tried pressing the seams open before I turn the napkin inside out. Didn’t make a difference. This time I will try to press with my mini iron by sticking my hand and the iron on the inside of the napkin. I am not hopeful, but we will see.

This is the only photo that really came out at all. It was hard to press with the mini iron and take photos at the same time.

Napkins 1
Napkins 1

You can see how I stuffed the mini iron into the inside of the napkin after I had turned it inside out and was pressing from the inside.

I have finally sewed these together and they came out moderately well. I still need to work harder at preventing the sleeves from collapsing.

San Mateo County Fair Yesterday

I love county fairs and wish that more people would enter their work. It is not a “highbrow” art organization, but everyone’s art and every entry is welcome. I also wish people would attend more county fairs.

It is great to see the wonderful and unusual items that people make and enter. It is great to see what people are doing in their homes: what they are collecting, the types of Lego and K’Nex constructions they build, the photos they take, the cakes they bake, the jams they cook and table settings they concoct, etc. I think county fairs are such a community event. You can really see stuff by your neighbors…. if more people would enter and attend.

That said, I have to admit that I didn’t enter something this year. I have done every year for the past several years and I just didn’t have (make??) the time this year. I will for sure next year. It is expensive to attend the fair ($32 for admission and parking), so getting the free tickets and parking passes from entering an exhibit is really worth it.

The boys were really interested in the Junior exhibits. They all reviewed all the Lego and K’Nex constructs very carefully and swore to build something for next year’s fair. We’ll see.

I, of course, went to the see the quilts. There were quite a number of them. I was, however, shocked at the California Living Building and the displays. There were no banners hanging outside. The building has been redone. It is not as light inside as it used to be. In previous years, quilts had been hung high up on the walls -near the ceiling, which made them hard to photograph, but made the building seem very cheerful. This year most of the quilts, even the prize winning quilts, were hung low and draped over something else or hung on racks very close together. At first I thought there weren’t very many quilts, but in the back of the hall I found quite a few, once I looked at the racks. There were some very nice quilts, especially a couple of star quilts that were amazingly intricate.

Another project off the ‘to do’ list!

I finished some napkins today that have been hanging around for several months. I bought the fabric in August 2004 at APNQ with JCN. I washed, cut up the fabric and did the first round of stitching. I even did the miserable part, which is turning the napkins inside out and carefully pressing them. I like two sided napkins as I can use more fabric and they don’t have to be washed as soon. Then they just hung around waiting for me to do the topstitching. I topstitched around one a few weeks ago, but didn’t get to the last three until today. Now they are finished and I can move on. These are the fabrics I used.