We interrupt this blog to bring you the 2014/15 school year

Wow! Have you noticed a rather long stretch of silence on Shadows of the Blue Ridge? I sure have. It seems every year when a new school year begins it takes me a while to adjust to a new normal and balance my work time with my "at home" time. Even if I haven't been blogging there has been some sewing going on over here: 

Early in August I tried a super tutorial from Dominique at The Running Thimble to make quilted luggage tags as part of a birthday gift for a sweet friend. So fun! And can I just say...these use scraps :o) I certainly see more of these luggage tags in my sewing future.

Front and back view

As I wrote in my last post, I was fortunate to be in on the first round of The Great Pillow Fight Swap over on flickr. It was a lot of fun learning about my secret partner :o) She likes bright colors and seems to be drawn to rainbow and color wheel designs. Using this information I chose the fabulous Christmas Snowflake pattern by Rachel Wooden Spoon to create a color wheel snowflake pillow.

I just love this snowflake block and ROYGBIV makes it so fun :o) I enjoy being able to use scraps from my supply and this pillow top was great way to do just that. For the quilting I did a continuous spiral. I just used the default needle position on my walking foot, so the quilt lines are about 3/8" apart. I've never done a spiral before and found it to be pretty easy once I got past the tiny part in the very center. This will be going in the mail to my partner as soon as the window for sending packages arrives.





This weekend I learned how to do Susie's Magic Binding from Aunt Marti @ 52 Quilts.com. This binding method allowed me to quickly finish up a small quilt that had a super fast deadline. Wow...if you've not tried this binding method you really need to! Generally I'm not a huge fan of using a machine to sew down binding, but the faux flange really makes it easy and in my opinion great looking, too. I was a bit concerned the flange would not line up nicely on the mitered corners while sewing the binding down, but just to show you how well this works here are all four corners...not a dud in sight :o) Now just to be honest I will say that I pin judiciously...about every inch, so that probably helped, too. 

Finally, one last piece of sewing fun. Earlier in the spring I wrote up this little post about Quilt Market. I mentioned that I'd been able to preorder one of Moda's Building Blocks quilt kits. Well...it arrived this week!! Just look at this beautiful box :o) 

I can't wait to dig in and get started on this beauty! However, I am going to exercise great restraint and continue working through my priority list first...but be assured there will be visions of this quilt floating in my head :o)

Happy quilting!