Fine art to funky traditional: life and quilting
Creative Quilters, I’d like to introduce you to Petite Pineapples, the August edition of our year-long color-of-the-month enhanced e-pattern series:
August’s featured color is blue-green, the hottest color of 2010. Petite Pineapples combines tradition with trend, juxtaposing 19th century-style hand applique with trendy blue-greens of 2010. This sweet runner uses a clean color palette [...]
Welcome to the July Color-of-the-Month slideshow, offering tips on using red in your quilt palette. This month’s show features Red in traditional, spare, summertime, and Christmas color palettes! This month I host Buggy Barn, Henry Glass Fabrics, Debbie Grifka, Benita Skinner, and more, sharing fabric designs and gorgeous quilts. [...]
Creative Quilters, I’d like to introduce you to Sunflower Summer, the May pattern update to our year-long color-of-the-month series.
May’s featured color is yellow, which so many quilters find to be challenging and avoid using. No more! Sunflower Summer shows you how to make yellow play well with others, giving yellow a chance to mingle and [...]
Look what the post man delivered today to my mailbox! My Top Ten Habits article is on the cover of the Feb/Mar Quilter’s Newsletter magazine above the masthead. Woo-hoo. I’m thrilled, proud, and humbled all at the same time. My husband and I are going out to dinner tonight to celebrate. In the [...]
First, the winners:
Thank you to everyone who visited yesterday during Day 3 of the Quiltmaker 100 Blocks Blog Tour. I was so moved by your comments I selected not just one winner but two! Congratulations to:
Diane Muska
Maeve315
Send me your mailing addresses to maria@colormastery.com and your issue and Old Glory will be on their way to [...]
More photos from my trip to Athens and Dragonfly Quilt Shop. As you walk in the shop you’re surrounded by gorgeous fabrics and samples that you can’t wait to make! Love the beautiful white armoire filled with goodies. The shop had a Kaffe Fassett table to get quilters excited about his workshop at Dragonfly. Deb [...]
Last weekend I attended the fall convention of the Georgia Quilt Council in Carrollton, GA. After all the years I’ve been quilting, this was my first time attending the council’s meeting, and I was impressed. These ladies know quilting and know Georgia. I met many wonderful quilters, appraisers, shop owners, historians, guild officers, and teachers. [...]
This week I hosted six children in my quilt studio to make Quillows. They were practically giddy they were so excited! We planted the seeds of lifelong sewers and quilters, and they were beaming with pride and tightly hugging their Quillows when they left.
On Monday we started by making a mini-Quillow. This turned out to [...]
My lecture at Ann Litrel’s gallery last Friday was delightful – thank you to so many of my friends, readers, and students who came out and supported me. I talked to gallery visitors as they stopped in and then my lecture was at 7p.m. I talked for only a short time about each art quilt, [...]
What is it about spring that makes me want to throw open the windows and swap out the winter pillows and fabrics for brighter, more light colors? Same goes for the blog. I’ve photographed a new header image and am trying a new Wordpress theme that’s easier on the eyes. Larger fonts, wider sidebars. I [...]
I adore books. Really. I would buy books before food and clothes, and when I go into a quilt shop I always look at what the new books are. So I was excited to see USABookNews.com’s picks for best Craft/Hobbies books. Take a peek and see how many quilting and sewing-related titles are here.
Looking for [...]
The November issue is out, and I included some incredible articles:
how to keep a color journal
how to orchestrate the colors in a “blended-type” quilt
a fabulous source for free machine quilting patterns
my favorite cranberry sauce recipe
details on my Twelve Days of Christmas giveaway
You are on the email list, right? Well, if not, you can sign up [...]
Multimedia message, originally uploaded by Colorful Quilter.
Ok, so he’s The Photo Man for The Quilt Show too. Gregory took all the gorgeous photos of the quilts in Color Mastery, and he is a large part of why the book turned out so beautifully. After all, the colors in the quilts had to be not just [...]
All quilted and ready for facing. Sometimes I love the backs of my quilts even more than the front, because I can see the quilting so much better. I don’t want the quilting to overwhelm the design and colors on the front, but I sure do love the machine quilting detail you can [...]
If you ever get wavy quilts after machine quilting them, you’ve probably got some really dense quilting designs that aren’t balanced throughout the quilt. My latest quilt is almost done: I’ve densely quilted the interior, but not the frame, thus the rolls and waves you see here. Once I quilt the frame portion the entire [...]
This is the ultimate stitch sampler. First, let me make clear this is not my quilt. I took this photograph over 10 years ago at a local quilt show when photography was not nearly as far along as it is now. This isn’t a great photo, but it will serve the purpose [...]
Once you’ve created your general mini-stitch samplers, you should be well-prepared for any type of quilting you want to do with your machine. I still, however, create a small sampler before I quilt on a project. I need to see how those stitches will look on the fabric I’m using.
My generic mini-stitch samplers [...]
If you’ve created your first set of mini-stitch samplers, then I recommend you create a sampler experimenting with specialty threads and changing your stitch settings. I like using the thicker machine quilting threads from YLI and Superior, so I experimented with regular straight and zig-zag stitches to see the difference the threads would make.
Then [...]
Being an instructor, I dutifully took the free classes offered when I bought my sewing machine years ago. Those classes didn’t even scratch the surface of what my machine could do. It came with a manual, but it didn’t really go in-depth either. I was determined to make the most of my [...]
Quilters have fabulous sewing machines that offer more stitches than we’ll ever really use. Let’s face it: most quilters use the straight stitch, zig-zag, feather stitch, buttonhole stitch, and maybe one or two others. But the remaining stitches are lonely, waiting to be remembered and at least acknowledged.
So do it. You [...]
What if I told you I could instantly make you a better machine quilter with just one simple technique? And you wouldn’t have to invest in any expensive tools, DVDs, or books. Just use what you have.
Interested?
Here it is:
Get to know your machine better. Spend some time with it. I can always tell the quilters [...]
Meet Maizy. She was so well-behaved in class. Her owner, Dolle, brought her to join us after lunch, and she was such a dear. Not even one bark.
We had so much fun at the Piecemakers’ Machine Quilting class in Cumming, Ga. We had hand-quilters, brand new quilters, and machine quilters who [...]
My kids missed me while I was gone, and one of their favorite ways to spend time together is drawing. I was exhausted and dragged myself into this, but as always with anything creative, I had a blast doing it.
This is a teapot pincushion in the Mary Engrelbreit Home magazine, spring issue. How [...]
Wow. I feel dwarfed by this quilt when I’m at my machine. It takes me, my sewing table, and a chair to hold it all. But we’re plugging along, block-by-block, and it’s almost done.
I’m spending 80% of my time wrestling, ahem, nudging, the quilt through my machine, and the other 20% actually [...]
Welcome to award-winning publisher, author, and quilt artist Maria Peagler's online studio and classroom. Relax, have some fun, and take a look around. You'll find quilts, free lessons and ebooks, all in an uncluttered, ad-free environment. Keep checking back, I've always got something new. Better yet, subscribe to my blog!
Subscribe to Quilts and Creativity
