Sew Sew Busy!

Did you see the first mantle cloth I made using the Let's Twist pattern?  It was for St. Patty's Day.  We liked it so much I made another for Easter.  This time it is with purple fabric for the main body, and Easter Egg fabric for the pinwheels.  I added some fancy stitches around the squares and in gold, the titles of some favorite Easter hymns.  Gotta get to it and get more made for various other holidays. 

 

 

 Once I'd completed the mantle piece, I tried a free downloaded pattern on the embroidery machine for a wall hanging.  I'm beginning to get the hang of the embroidery machine.

Carol (my sister) visited and brought with her the quilt she's made from material I inherited from our Aunt Martha and handed on to Carol.  She wanted me to embroider a bit of something on each of the plain squares.  This is what we came up with.

 This is the signature square I created....was hoping to embroider all the words, but hadn't figured that out yet.  But it says all the important stuff.

 And here's Carol with the completed quilt.  Aunt Mar would have been most pleased, I am sure.  Especially since we did it together!

Twistin' the Day Away

Been seeing a lot of projects done with the Twist (Let's Twist etc) technique, and to be perfectly honest, it boggled my mind!  Just couldn't get into my head how it was done.  So I bought the book and the template and received an invitation to a baby shower - decided, perfect time to learn!
First, you sew blocks together - I raided the pink stash pile since I found out baby is a girl.  I used 10" squares.

Once all the squares were sewn together, I added a 6 1/2 " border all the way around.

Press it well, and then the "fun" begins!

By aligning the cross marks on the template with the intersecting seams, you cut around.
The little feet on the template really make it stick!  Unfortunately, however, they started out being too high for a good cut with my rotary cutter!  I marked with a fine pencil for a while, and had to resort to re-cutting with scissors for about 6 squares...with heavy pressure, over time, it seemed the little feet had given some and by the end, I was getting decent cuts.

This pile is what was left of the quilt top in the third picture -

And this is the end result!
For just a few dollars (most of the fabric I already had - just have to count the batting) I have a shower gift almost ready, and I learned a really fun technique!
The project so far has taken two days!  Gotta love it!