Off the Bolt
Stories, stitches, and the little wins between seams ~ pull up a chair.
Quilters Lifestyle
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The Shirt You Actually Sew In
There is the shirt you wear to guild and the shirt you wear at the machine, and they are rarely the same shirt. The machine shirt has to survive an iron running at cotton for three hours, a lap full of half-square triangles, and the cat. It cannot be fussy. It cannot be heavy. It has to be the one you forget you have on until somebody reads it out loud in the fabric store and laughs.
Latest Articles
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From the First Cut to the Final Stitch, a Few Good Words for Every Step
A quilt is a long conversation. It starts with a stack of fabric and a big idea, wanders through a few rough patches in the middle and ends, eventually, wrapped around someone you love. The Good Stuff ~ Pieced Together is our collection of quiet, clean line drawings, star blocks, spools, folded quilts and winding roads, each paired with a few words that fit one moment in that conversation. Here they are, in the order a quilt usually happens. -
Gather Round the Campfire for Tonight's Ranger Talk
At dusk in the national parks, visitors carry their camp chairs down to the little amphitheater, the fire gets going, and a ranger in a flat hat tells everyone who lives nearby. Quilters always sit in the front row, usually with a hand project in their laps. Stitchin' Through the Parks is that evening program in design form, a tour of the parks and the animals who call them home, each one drawn with a quilter's eye for detail. Settle in. The ranger is about to begin. -
If the Park Animals Took Up Quilting, Here Is the Block Each One Would Pick
Quilters have always borrowed from the wild. We have Bear's Paw, Flying Geese, Fox and Geese and Ocean Waves, all named by women who looked out the window and saw a pattern. Stitchin' In The Parks turns the idea around. Each design is one of our Stitchin In Beauty national park badges, a finely drawn animal set among wildflowers under the park's name, and we could not help wondering which block every one of these animals would reach for first.
