MyWebQuilter.com

Quilting Arts Magazine has an annual calendar block challenge. This year's theme was "Feeling Pet- ty " where you make a quilt block of a pet or animal. I live in a small town on the shores of Lake Michigan. My yard backs up to a large marsh, adjacent to the open waters of Lake Michigan. The marsh supports much animal life including "my" herd of "pet" deer. Every evening they travel along the lake shore dining on the local bird feeders. We keep the feeders full and put out corn for them in the winter. My quilt shows one of the girls looking in our sliding door. I think she is saying "I would like some more please." My quilt did not make the list of finalist. Oh well.....I love my "deer" little quilt. Happy Quilting Amber For more than 200 free quilt block patterns, free quilt design software and free quilting calculators, visit MyWebQuilter .com .

I am attending a class today with my friend Sally to make this fun doll pin cushion. The class will be held at Alley Kat's Quilt Shop in Marquette, MI and taught by Paulette Carr . Should be fun! I found an orange/purple batik for the cushion and a fancy orange/purple/gold for her dress. Sally and I enjoyed Paulette's face drawing class last year. Happy quilting Amber For more than 200 free quilt block patterns, free quilt design software and quilting calculators, visit MyWebQuilter .com

My quilt guild has put on a number of lovely quilt shows over the years. These shows have been a fun way to show our work and raise money for local charities. Our last one was in October 2009. This last show ended up being quite large for us, with more than 150 quilts, hundreds of visitors, etc. We were able to make nice contributions to local charities but it is an amazing amount of work for our small group. We decided to change the show to every other year due to the amount of work required. However, our group has gotten even smaller, we are all getting older and we have now decided to cancel the show that we had planned for this year. It is a little sad but also a huge relief. We will raise some money for charity from a raffle quilt that we have already started. Now we will be able to spend time at our guild meetings learning new quilting techniques instead of all the business of putting on a large quilt show. Perhaps we can plan a few trips to out of town quilt shows. Here are a f

Every blog I have read for the last few days it talking about snow. Well in the UP of Michigan , we typically get a lot of snow - my home town averages 90 in/season. This is not very much snow compared to areas north of us. We usually have snow on the ground from November to April. We have had very little snow this year. I could actually see bare ground until we got 4 inches today. Anyway - I LOVE snow and want more of it. Here I am taking a turn around the Rapid River Ski Trail on Sunday. About a week ago, I posted about my huge Quodlibit quilt using Asian fabrics. I finally have the center assembled. Here it is hanging from the loft in my house. You know, you really do need to square up quilt blocks. I have worked on this quilt on/off for a year and just forgot to square up some of the 6 in squares that determine the size of the quilt. Needless to say, I assembled most of them prior to realizing my mistake and had to unsew several rows. Duh! I hate to unsew and this quilt it so

A fun, free feature of the free quilt design software at MyWebQuilter.com is quilt block coloring. To use this feature select Color Quilt Blocks under Quilt Blocks on the menu. You will see following page. If you have not selected a specific quilt block to color, you will see a Churn Dash block. If you prefer to color a different quilt block, start by selecting one or more quilt blocks on the Select Quilt Block page also under Quilt Blocks on the menu. You will see your selected quilt blocks in the list on the right side of the page. Click on the block that you want to color from the Blocks for my Quilt list. The list on the left shows any standard colors that I created for the block. To make your own, new color select the link Create New Color. The coloring page consists of two steps. Step 1 lets you choose a color to change. The basic version of the quilt block on the left with your recolored version on the right. When you first come to this page, they will be the same. There is a li

Today I added the Simplex Star Quilt Block to the free quilt block patterns at MyWebQuilter .com . Simplex Star is an easy, beginner, 9 patch block similar to the Friendship Star. The pictures below show simplex star in red and orange color waves. For more than 200 free quilt block patterns, free quilting calculators and free quilt design software visit MyWebQuilter .com . Happy Quilting! Amber

I just added the Spool and Bobbin quilt block pattern to MyWebQuilter.com . This is an easy 4 patch block that forms an interesting star pattern. Here are pictures of the block in the green and purple color waves. For more than 200 free quilt block patterns checkout MyWebQuilter.com . Happy Quilting! Amber

The Art Quilt group that I belong to met last Thursday. We meet about every 6-8 weeks and one of our members organizes a program. Often it is a new technique or idea that we try out. This meeting was working with Lutradur. Lutradur is a 100% polyester, translucent material that has been used on mattress backings. Glenna organized a program to try the various techniques in this book. To keep us focused she had us pick a vegetable or fruit and write a Haiku about it. Then using the Lutradur with other materials we worked on creating an art quilt about our vegetable. I picked tomato. I was inspired to pick tomato because I received my Burpee catalog . Of course I live too far north and have too much shade in my yard to actually grow tomatoes. But fresh tomatoes in the summer is one of my very favorite foods. ..my Haiku is Summer's bounty Juicy, red, warm, delicious My mouth watering This picture shows how far I got in our meeting.... We started by painting the Lutradur, our poems prin

I thought I would blog a little today about how to use the Design Quilt page at MyWebQuilter.com . If you just click on the Design Quilt page, you are presented with a very simple quilt using a Churn Dash block. From looking at the website statistics, it seems that some people just click to other pages from here and don't go further to actually design a quilt. I guess they are just checking out the site. To understand what this quilt design software can do, you have to take a few more steps! There are 2 basic things you may want to do when you see this Churn Dash quilt.. Change to different quilt blocks Change other things about the quilt For today's blog entry, I am going to talk about Changing the Quilt Blocks. To do that, you need to go to the page to select quilt blocks. Any web page is limited on space so I made selecting quilt blocks for your quilt one page and using the blocks you selected to design a quilt a separate page. Of course if you know this, you can start on th

I updated the menu at MyWebQuilter .com after realizing, there are so many new pages that some pages might be hard to find. It was quite a technical, computer programming challenge to get the menu to work with all web browsers - Internet Explorer, Chrome, Mozilla, and Safari. At least, I think it is working for all of these! This picture shows the new menu for Quilt Blocks. It is now very easy to access the: New Quilt Block Library page for larger block pictures and links to the free quilt block patterns Select Quilt Blocks for a quilt design Quilt Block Coloring page. There are also drop down menus for Quilt Patterns ( my patterns vs. automated computer generated patterns ) and the quilting calculators ( Backing & Binding and OnPoint Setting Triangles ). If you have any trouble with the new menu, please comment on the blog or send an email to customerservice@mywebquilter.com . Let me know what web browser you are using, the page you were on and a description of the problem. Ha

Happy New Year everyone! My new year started with a beautiful sunrise over Lake Michigan. As you may notice, we are somewhat lacking in snow. It actually rained here melting most of the snow - unheard of for the UP of Michigan. I am really disappointed to not be able to x-country ski! I have been trying to finish my quilting UFOs - a resolution for this year. I have also been working on improvements for MyWebQuilter .com . Will fill you in soon! Happy New Year! Amber