Cereal Box Files

Got a little crafty with my girl today. She recently moved home for her last year of college and wanted to do some organizing in her room. We are both tired of the basic, boring plastic storage boxes and bins. So we started collecting cereal boxes. We added some paint, some fabric, and a little Mod Podge.

First, the boxes were cut to the right size. Then all four sides were painted. The paint was leftover from when the room was painted so we had a perfect match.


We cut fabric to fit the ends, then used Mod Podge to glue and seal it.


The result is a fashionable, inexpensive set of files. We're working on a cute way to add "In" and "Out" to each box. Turn them to see the papers when you need them, then turn them to face the wall when you just want to look at something pretty.


There's a great tutorial for making these, and lots of other projects over on Sew Many Ways blog. Find the entry here.

A Wedding Reception for Quilts

Have you ever been to a wedding reception where no one got married? We did just that at the shop this past Saturday. Fay Rawls hosted a fabulous wedding reception and show and tell party. Last year, she and Mary Colley spent a year teaching blocks from the Sylvia's Bridal Sampler book. All of their students worked really hard and finished some beautiful quilts.

There was wedding cake.

There was punch.


There were nuts, mints, party favors, and rose petals.

All of this was great fun. But the best part was the quilts.

The next two were made by the same maker. She named them "Sylvia" and "Andrew".

This one hasn't been pieced yet, but it was made from old shirts. The blocks look great.

I love show and tell parties. It's always fun to see how the same quilt can be made in so many different ways. It's also great inspiration for starting a new project. Most of the finished tops are on display in our classroom for the next couple of weeks. If you can, you should stop by and see them in person.

A big thank you to Fay for putting on a great party, and to her husband Jess, who took all of the pictures in this post.

Movie Night

Once a year, our community sponsors a movie on the lawn night at one of our local parks. This is our second year attending. The fun started at 6pm with games, a moon walk, and big slide. There were food vendors, too. The weather threatened rain all day but by the time the event started, the skies were clearing. We packed a picnic for the festivities so we had good food and good temperatures for the daylight hours.

It's becoming a rare thing for us to do something like this with the entire family in attendance, and I was very happy we were able to be together for an evening. Here's me and the hubby (in a totally unplanned pose):

the oldest and the youngest,



the oldest son and his girlfriend,

and the two youngest in a semi-pose that I caught between their wrestling rounds.

After the sun went down, the temperature dropped quickly. We had jackets but still had to snuggle to keep warm. The movie was Despicable Me. It just gets an "okay" rating from me, which is fine since I was going much more for the family time anyway.

New Mouse Pads

Made some new mouse pads for the Etsy shop this morning. My two favorites from this group are this funky orange mushroom print and the red chairs. Both are super fun.

Cultural Arts Night

Hello all. Long time no blog. It's been a little busy, which means there are lots of things to blog about, just not much time to get it written down. Last night I had the pleasure of exhibiting at Oconee County Elementary School's Cultural Arts Night. My job was to show things quilty and answer questions for anyone interested in the art of quilting. It was a great event and full of fun activities for the kiddos.

Don't you love the artwork on the wall behind me? Makes me want to make a quilt with kid art all over it.

What I was trying to show with my display was how quilting has changed over the years. I had old quilts from my grandmother, some quilt magazines from the early 1980s, cardboard templates and scissors. On the opposite side of the table, I had my rotary cutter, ruler, and mat. There were current quilting magazines and books. I also had some smaller projects to show that you can do so much more than make a big quilt. There were quilts draped on chairs all around my table.

At the entrance to our room, there was a big sign that said "Quilting Demonstration". Throughout the event, I worked on hand sewing the binding to a quilt. Not much of a demonstration, but hey, it was the best I could do.


I was fortunate to share the room with Jennifer Heynen, who was doing bead and button making demonstrations. She is also the designer of the fabric in the quilt I am binding. Beautiful.

There were music demonstrations, physical education activities, student art displays, and an instrument petting zoo where the kids could try out all sorts of musical instruments. All during the evening, I kept thinking my phone was vibrating. It wasn't until the end of the night that I realized it was the low horns being tried out by the kids that I was hearing!

Even though this isn't the school my kids attend, they went with me as assistants. At the end of the evening, they were ready to sell our house and move so they could attend this school. I'd say that is a sign of a successful event.

Featured Fabric of the Week

A friend of mine recently suggested that I start featuring a bolt of fabric at the shop. Just one? Really? Well, why not! So here is this week's fabric. I may be jumping the gun a bit by saying "of the week" but we'll see how it goes. It was certainly fun putting together something for this week.

Here's the best part. This bolt of fabric, and only this bolt, is available to in store customers for only $5 a yard. And we're not talking clearance or discount stuff here. This is top quality, top designer fabric. It's Kaffe Fassett's Cogs in yellow. Very fun and very springy. And look, we've already selected a great set of coordinates to work with it (Thanks Jessica!).

Jessica says she would take the entire group of coordinates, use the Easy Dresden template and make a dresden plate pillow with the featured fabric as the center of the dresden and then also as the back of the pillow. Great idea.

How about taking a few of those coordinates and making an adorable girl's skirt from the book Sweet Sassy Skirts?

And after you make the skirt, you can make a cute butterfly yo-yo, attach it to a headband, and have a very well coordinated little girl. Add an applique of a butterfly shape to a t-shirt for a complete spring outfit.


I love the Four Corners Apron pattern to show off any fabric. Pair the featured fabric with any of its coordinates for a great spring apron. My personal favorite coordinate for this project is the blue swirly fabric about halfway down on the left behind the pattern.


Another idea is to play around with the blocks in one of our newer books, Fusible Magic.


Just think, if you played around with five of these blocks, set them on point, and used the featured fabric for your setting blocks, you'd have an awesome spring wall hanging.

There are even more ideas that you can see in the shop. There won't be a big sign with the sale price. Just tell us you saw it here when you check out and we'll be sure to give you a great deal on our first ever featured fabric special.

Hope to see you in the shop this week!

Inspired by Zentangle

I love quilter's gossip. It goes something like this:
Did you see last Thursday's episode of Quilting Arts? Well, I didn't see it either, but I was talking to Holley, and she said they were talking about this new way to design a quilt. You just take a piece of paper and doodle on it, you know, like you used to do in school when you were bored. Wait, let me think. Oh yeah, they called it Zentangle.

And that's all it took to get me started. A little quilter's gossip. I wanted to try it just because the name sounded fun AND I was an awesome doodler in school. So, with only a name and a brief description, I set out to create my own fabric Zentangle. I decided to make a design for a small embroidery hoop. I took a pencil and drew/scribbled randomly on a piece of paper. I drew the circle of the hoop as my boundaries, and filled in each section with a different fabric.


I was off to a good start, but wanted to do more. For my next project, I decided to add an image to the center of design.


Next, I traced the inside of the embroidery hoop to establish a boundary. Then I closed my eyes and lightly drew lines all over the design. I drew in a pattern of gently curving lines horizontally and vertically. They can barely be seen in the picture.


Next, I darkened the lines that I wanted to use as part of the design and made a few adjustments to make sure I didn't have any super tiny pieces.


Next, I numbered each of the sections.


I remembered a charm pack of dragonfly prints that had been given to me several years ago. It was perfect for this project. I chose 15 of the charm squares and tried to stick with blue, purple, and pink.


Then I traced all of those sections onto double sided fusible interfacing. Steam-a-Seam 2 Lite is my fusible of choice. I tried to be careful and trace exactly on the line if it was on the outside of the circle or directly connected to the dragonfly. All other lines were traced about a sixteenth of an inch inside the line.


I cut the numbered pieces apart and assigned them to a fabric. Normally, I would let this occur in a totally random fashion, but I wanted to be sure that light fabrics were next to the dragonfly and since I was using most of them twice, I wanted to be sure they weren't too close together.


I ironed each piece to the back of the fabric, and cut them out. Then I began placing them on the background fabric. This was a little tricky since the resulting picture is the mirror image of the drawing I made. If I do more of these, I will be sure to reverse the image before tracing it onto the fusible interfacing. It can be tricky to put together a puzzle using the mirror image!


Nothing was ironed down until the entire piece was laid out. It's a good thing too because I had to make a number of adjustments to make everything fit. I can tell I need to be more precise with my drawing and cutting. Again, if I make more, I will spend more time drafting the pattern and tracing the pieces to make sure they fit together better.


And the finished piece...


I'm not quite sure what to do with it from here. I know I don't want to sew around each piece individually but I need to do something to secure them a bit. I may try using some sort of light translucent thread and stitch a curvy, loopy line that mimics a dragonfly in flight. Or a sheer fabric stitched over the top might be fun, too. I'm not feeling too Zen about the next step of this project just yet but I'm certainly ZenTickled about ZenTangle!

Oh, one more thing. I actually looked up what real Zentangle is and it's a very cool art form. Check it out at zentangle.com.