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Archive for April, 2008
Thanks to your feedback, I’ll be including both the fabric and illustrated color wheels in Color Mastery. Your comments made it possible. Thanks!
Congratulations - it’s a book! This is a sneak peek from the cover of the upcoming book I’ve been hinting at:
Color Mastery: 10 Principles for Creating Stunning Quilts
If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you know how passionate I am about color. Now, I’m sharing that passion with you, and giving you a glimpse at the book throughout the week.
Color Mastery will be available in your local quilt shop in February ‘09. That sounds like a date in the distant future, but it will be here before we know it! I’ll be attending my first quilt market this May to meet and greet with distributors to ensure the book will be available in your area, even if it’s internationally!
Note to international readers: send me the link or email for your local quilt shop and I’ll chat with them to find out their distributor who supplies their books. I’m at mariapeagler(at)tds(dot)net.
Look for a blog I’m developing that will be solely about Color Mastery. I’ll then be returning to the regular content I do on this site: quilting, creativity, life, and and how they all interact.
Next up: Color Mastery’s Table of Contents. Be the first to get a top-secret look into the chapters and projects that will open your eyes to the world of artistic color in your quilts!
And the winners of the bookmarks with the ruler on the back are:
Everyone!
I couldn’t pick just five, so I’m sending them to everyone who gave me feedback, as I treasure each of your comments. Please email me privately your mailing address and the gorgeous bookmarks will be on their way to you. You won’t believe how beautiful they are!
Thank you for your feedback on the color wheels. What astute readers I have! I’m quite impressed ya’ll noticed the color wheels didn’t match in having yellow at the top. We had changed that a while back, but I used an older version. It was actually quite helpful in communicating to my design team things that are important to quilters that others don’t see.
And stay tuned: next week, I’ll be posting the book’s title, cover, and table of contents. I promise you won’t want to miss it!
Meg Cox, author of The Quilter’s Catalog, writes an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal profiling how Paducah, KY has been transformed from a poor, rural, nowhere town into a booming economic powerhouse, all due to the quilting industry. It’s a great read and an amazing profile of how far quilters have come. Click on the link below to read it.
Wall Street Journal article: Stitching Up the Future, by Meg Cox
I need your valued opinions! I’m deliberating as to which version of the color wheel to include in an appendix in the back of my book: a fabric color wheel, or the illustration. Which do you prefer and would find more useful? The appendix will have a sheet of mini-color wheels you can cut out and paste into your journal as you’re designing your quilts. Fun, huh?
I’ll draw from the votes and award five people a bookmark for the book that has a ruler on the back. Quite handy for measuring seams, etc. Thanks for participating. I value your input!
My hands hurt. Specifically, my thumbs at the joint where they join the wrist. I guess quilting overload will do that. I talked to my doctor about it, and she said it’s from overuse, and I need to pace myself when I quilt.
Who is she kidding?
Do ya’ll have this? If so, what do you do about it? Dr. suggested trying out some of the hand support braces at the drugstore. I’ve seen quilters use them, but I’ve been too vain to do it. They aren’t the most attractive accessories.
Jeanne over at Sew Memorable is hosting a Country Music quilt challenge. Make a quilt using your favorite country music song as its title. My friend Pat made one with hunky cowboy fabric. She did an awful lot of piecing for a challenge quilt. Good for her!
The challenge will be up throughout the month of April. If you get a chance, stop by and check out the quilts. One even has a Patsy Cline/Picasso theme. That leaves you thinking, doesn’t it?
I’ve just completed a binding marathon: five quilts in two days. I love creating bindings and using unique fabrics for them. However, I’m not great at determining how much binding I need for a quilt. So I always just guessed at it and ended up with too much and lots of leftover pieces.
Until now. I found this fantastic method, and after testing it with five quilts I can confidently say it works every time. Here’s how you do it:
- Add the measurements of all four sides of your quilt.
- Add 20″ to that number to allow for seams and the binding start/finish.
- Multiply your sum by the width of your binding, usually 2.25 (2-1/4″).
- Take that number and get its square root. There are lots of online calculators for doing this, including this one.
Your result is the size of the square you need to cut enough bias binding to bind your quilt. Really. It’s that simple.
Here’s an example for one of my quilts:
- The quilt is 58″ square. So in adding up all four sides, I get 58″x4= 232″.
- Now I add 20″ to that number: 232″ + 20″ = 252″.
- Multiply my total by the binding width: 252 x 2.25=567″
- Get the square root: 23.81 or 24″ rounded up.
I need a 24″ square to cut enough 2-1/4″ binding for my quilt. That tells me a fat quarter isn’t enough.
Hope you find this useful. Bookmark it and use it often. It saved me from cutting too much fabric for my bindings. And I love looking like a math person, when I’m really not!
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