Cooking? I’d Rather Be Quilting

More time for quilting!

I am not a huge fan of cooking. All that chopping, hovering over a saucepan for hours, sauteing and whatnot. Let’s just say the only “deglazing” I’ve ever done is picking the toppings off a donut. Given the same amount of time, I’d rather be quilting than cooking. Here are the top 5 reasons that quilting, in my opinion, is vastly superior to cooking:

  1. Didn’t I just do this last night? Cooking dinner night after night is such a tedious chore, not to mention lunches and breakfasts! Quilting, on the other hand, I could do it morning, noon and night… plus a few “snacks” thrown in between.
  2. Leftovers. You know those “still perfectly usable also I’m saving them” scraps left over from your last quilt? They are not going to turn into a spoiled, quivering, moldy mess if you leave them on the shelf for a couple of years. Try doing that with what’s left of last night’s delicious bean casserole.
  3. Eat ramen. Make quilts. Cooking, even for a small family of four, costs hundreds of dollars per week. Imagine how many quilts you could make with that same amount of money!
  4. So many widgets. Unless you are one of those people living in a van, cooking uses a zillion tools which take up an entire dedicated room – the kitchen – to store. Quilting, on the other hand, only necessitates a sewing machine, a few pins & needles and some scissors. If you want to get fancy, thrown in a rotary cutter and a mat. That’s it and you are good to go. Try subsisting with such as small number of kitchen widgets and you’ll ending up steaming spaghetti in a hub cap.
  5. Blink and it’s gone. You know that incredible puff pastry encased salmon you made last night? Well, it’s gone now. That equally impressive quilt with the scalloped edges that I made ten years ago? I still have it.

So tonight, skip the grocery store and pop by the quilt shop instead. You will be glad you did.

Only FOUR Yards?

Only FOUR yards?

This was the very first By the Yard® ever published way back in January of 2018. Like many episodes of By the Yard, it was pretty much ripped from the headlines of Quilt Girl and Train Guy’s lives. Quilt Girl was puzzled by Train Guy’s insistence that she buy and entire bolt of fabric, when she only really “needed” a few yards. She immediately suspected treachery. This incident spawned the By the Yard® comic strip where two crafty people collude in all kinds of hobbies, mainly quilting and model railroading… but they also enjoy knitting & crochet and covering the yard with old junk tractors, respectively.

A Proposed Difficulty Level Scale for Quilting Patterns

Proposed Level of Difficulty scale for Quilting
Lots of things have rating scales. Video games have ratings, from E for Everyone to M for Mature. Recipes always tell you how much time they take to cook. Board games have both a maturity rating and a time scale. Yet when you buy a quilting pattern, you are pretty much going into it blind. That pattern may look simple – after all it’s just a bunch of cute little birdies – but in reality, you have no idea what you are getting yourself into. It is for this reason that I propose a Quilt Pattern Difficulty Level scale, so that you know if you can just work on your quilt after dinner here and there or you will have to clear the entire family out of the house for a week. Consider the following ratings:

  • Just Chillin’ & Quiltin’ – Made up of entirely 2 ½” strips or anything that contains all right angles. You can make a delightful quilt entirely from 2 ½” strips, such as the popular Jelly Roll Run and my personal favorite, the Log Cabin – which looks really complicated but it is really just a bunch of strips. There are many quilt patterns touted as “fat quarter friendly” such as the perennial favorite Yellow Brick Road. They are made from fat quarters chopped into various smaller squares and rectangles. With any of these patterns, you could legitimately make an entire quilt top in single day.
  • Officially a Quilter – Contains Half Square Triangles (HST). Once you’ve got the hang of those strips and squares, time to move on to the good ol’ HST. From the easy and fun Pinwheel block to the more complicated Broken Dishes, you can really show off your quilting chops with how well you line up those points!
  • Ain’t No Geometry Got This Covered – Anything that utilizes Foundation Paper Piecing (FPP). With FPP you can make beautiful flowers like the Bird of Paradise or your favorite puppy like a cute little pug. FPP is for when you can no longer make the design with rectangles and triangles. And you thought you hated geometry in high school!
  • Only Because I Love You – Dresden Plates, Double Wedding Ring and the like. Sure, these designs are quaint and the very epitome of quilt-y charm, but no mere mortal would even attempt them unless they were for a very special, “once in a lifetime gift”. My mother didn’t want any more grandchildren after I asked her to make a Dresden Plate baby quilt for my first.
  • Even Grandma Couldn’t Finish This – English Paper Piecing and anything appliqué. How many unfinished Grandma’s Flower Garden (GFG) quilts have you seen available for sale online, with the seemingly innocent invitation for you to “finish an heirloom”? Do you know why they are unfinished? Because assembling all of those tiny, hand sewn hexagons is unmitigated torture. As for appliqué, I still have a partially completed appliquéd Christmas stocking my grandmother started for me before Luke Skywalker took on his first storm trooper.

Armed with this handy guide, you are now ready to head out to the quilt shop to pick out a pattern for your next quilt!
…

Clutter vs. Creativity

That’s not CLUTTER, that’s CREATIVITY!
I have heard some creative types say that they “need” clutter around them so that they can be creative. They assert that having lots of different things around them helps them to get inspiration. I think this is true to some degree, for example if you have a specific project in mind and you are trying to choose a fabric or color scheme. But having so much stuff in your workspace that you can’t actually work may be inspiring but it is ultimately going to be a detriment to productivity. So where is the happy medium? Here are a few tips on how you can be inspired with out being overwhelmed.

  • Design Wall – Quilters use design walls to lay out quilt blocks during the design process. But when you are not using it for that, you can use a design wall as an “inspiration” board. Pin fabrics you like to it to see how well they go with others. Pin up printouts of inspirational objects and projects you find online. Many times, it’s more motivating to see a photograph of something where you can sit back and take it in from a distance rather than staring at it closely on the computer screen.
  • Organized Supplies – I find it very helpful to have my supplies nearby where I can see them but not have them right under my nose. I keep my fabric on bookcases across from my desk so I can “browse” through it, just like a library! I keep my supplies such as buttons, buckles and a myriad of other notions in clear plastic bins on a nearby shelving unit. This way its easy to see what I have and easy to come up with ideas.
  • Clean Up Fridays – When I worked in Corporate America as an Engineering Manager for a software company, I had a little rule for myself. Friday afternoons I always cleanup up my desk. This was for two reasons:
    1. By 3pm on Friday I was usually so fried I wasn’t good for doing any real work, so cleaning up was at least something productive I could do
    2. More importantly, this ensured my desk would be ready to function first thing on Monday when there was usually some crisis happening first thing in the morning

    Try cleaning up your creative space on Friday afternoon. Put away patterns, hang up rulers and rotary cutters, sweep up cookie crumbs, toss fabric scraps into a bin and fold up the bigger pieces. Even if you are in the middle of a project, this once weekly re-set will keep your workspace from getting out of control and keep the creativity flowing.

…

Three Ways to Save Time Binding Your Quilt

Anything but binding!

You’ve spent weeks making the perfect quilt but now it’s time for the worst part – binding. Many quilters consider it a tedious but necessary evil. Here are some suggestions for making the binding process a little easier:

  • Continuous Strip Binding – Continuous strip binding is the most common method of binding and has the advantage of providing two layers of fabric to protect the edge of your quilt. The binding is usually machine sewn to the front of the quilt and hand stitched to the back. You can save tons of time by machine sewing the binding on the back, but this can sometimes have the unwanted side effect of showing a machine stitching line on the front that is not so straight. This problem is easily solved by machine sewing the binding the back first, then finish by folding the binding to the front and machine stitching on the front. This way, you can see what you are doing on the front and neatly machine stitch the perfect distance from the edge of the binding.
  • Self-Binding – Self-binding is significantly less time consuming than the traditional continuous strip binding and it’s a great way to show off a really pretty backing fabric. With self-binding, the backing fabric also doubles as the quilt’s binding. Simply cut the backing fabric a couple of inches larger than the quilt. Press the fabric once towards the quilt, matching the cut edge of the binding to the edge of the quilt, then press again over the front of the quilt and top stitch. The disadvantage is your binding will only be one layer thick. If your quilt is going to receive a lot of wear and tear, you might want to endure the continuous strip binding.
  • Pillowcase Method – You can avoid binding all together with this method! Simply cut your backing the same size as the quilt, sew together with right sides facing, leaving an opening large enough for turning right side out. Blind stitch the opening closed and finish by tying. You won’t be able to quilt the layers by traditional means because the quilt could get really scrunched up and distorted but think of the time you’ll save!

Whichever method you chose, the sooner your binding is done, the sooner you can start your next quilt!

…
Please join us here every Wednesday for another fun, fiber-filled installment of By the Yard. You can find fun gifts and merch like calendars, coffee cups, greeting cards plus Sew Fun® quilting & sewing patterns HERE in the By the Yard® store!

Sometimes You are Going to Give a Gift Card

Sometimes You are Going to Give a Gift Card

I’m sure I speak for many crafty folks out there as well as myself when I say: every year, I vow to make all handmade gifts. I’ve been at this game long enough to know if you even want a prayer of doing it, you have to start in July. I’ve got that part down. But somehow, despite starting early, I never manage to get my handmade gifts done. By the time you are reading this, at best it is two days before Christmas. I want to tell you that it’s OK to just set that glue gun down. Here are some scenarios when its OK to forgo the handmade gifts:

  • When the list gets too long – Way back in July, I planned on making handmade gifts for all of the gals in my knitting group. In July, it seemed like a sterling idea. At the time, there were only 5 people in the group. But by November, the groups ranks had blossomed to over one dozen. Making over a dozen handmade gifts no longer seemed reasonably achievable. You can make 3 or 4 handmade gifts, but once you get into double digits, you have surpassed handmade and entered the territory of mass-production.
  • When the recipients aren’t going to be into it – Crafty people LOVE handmade gifts, and we know and greatly appreciate the level of effort and the expense that goes into making them. But if you are gifting people who are not crafty, they may not appreciate the effort. One year, I had a sister-in-law offer to give me money so that I could “buy good gifts next year”. Do not craft for these people.
  • When it’s going to make you stressed out – If making the handmade gifts is going to require you skipping sleep, staying up late nights, and yelling at your family to leave you the heck alone then you are not going to derive any pleasure from this gift giving effort. You would be better off to scale back your plans, make some popcorn and watch a movie with the kids.

If you find yourself picking up a handful of gift cards tomorrow, do not despair. They don’t have to be the “worst gift ever”. For example, one of the knitters in my knitting club lost her father this year. As a result, she’s just not feeling the big gift-giving spirit. But she found a simple but thoughtful way to come up with gifts for her family and at the same time honor the spirit of her Dad. It turns out, he loved coffee and Lindt chocolates. So, she is giving everyone in her family a little bag with a few Lindt chocolates and a gift card to a local coffee shop. On the cards, she wrote “Have a coffee with Dad”. In doing so, she’s not just giving chocolate and coffee, she’s giving everyone an opportunity to share memories of Dad.
…