August 8, 2016 Podcast
Guest: Cheryl Brickey of Meadow Mist Designs
Topics: quilt piecing tips
She says: "I was going through the store one day and saw beautiful fabrics in sheets. And I said, 'Why won't these work for a quilt backing?' I asked some people and I heard that your tension would be bad, the quilt won't last as long, your thread's going to break. I'm an engineer, so I figured I'd try it. It's just fabric in the end, and if it didn't work, I'd unpick it. But it worked beautifully! You might not want to do this as a try on the beautiful quilt that you've been making for two years, but if it enables someone to make a charity quilt or finish that stack of quilt tops that they have sitting in their room, try it out!"
Guest: Nancy McNally
Topics: machine quilting tips
She says: "A lot of longarm quilters are like this -- we look at our surroundings or we look at the quilt top and try and pull an element out of the fabric if it's a printed fabric. But you try to read the quilt. Some people don't want the artist work that I do, they want you to do just the basic edge-to-edge. But I want to pull out an element of the quilt, bring it out, and put it all into the thread work."
Guest: Tammy Silvers
Topics: improv quilting
She says: "Improvisational piecing -- I think of it as you're just kind of winging it. I want a wonky angle here, so it's almost like the flip-and-stitch technique gone to the extreme. But I give people measurements. So there are no templates, but they're marking where they want to start and where they want to end, so they have a guideline for where the fabric is going to be placed. So it's not as stressful as working with templates, but it lets you get those fun, wonky angles without too much work."
Guest: Kate Henderson of Two Little Banshees
Topics: precut fabrics
She says: "[I plan my quilts using jelly rolls] with graph paper. I love graph paper. It's perfect. It's all set out there for you, and all you need is some colored pencils. And you can start just playing around with angles and colors. And you start turning your paper around and you find different things. Things just seem to happen. And when you think you've run out of ideas, you do something else and you find a new block."