Zojirushi bread machine

A tale of the most expensive Christmas bread…

Every year I make a special Christmas bread that my family loves. It’s basically a riff on stollen that began years ago when we did a Christmas dinner from a different country every year. Since then, the kids have grown up and added our grandchildren to the mix, but we […]

polar bear stitched on grey fabric with white and gold snow swirls, all surmounted with a crown.

King of the Ice

I’ve posted before about designs from San Francisco Stitch Co. As they’ve done in several times in the past, they’re providing a free set of designs, one block at a time over the course of several weeks. This time, the 6″ blocks are called Winter Twist, and each block will […]

Black background with Drunkard's Path blocks and triangles, done in two shades each of purple, green, orange, and blue.

Win a few, lose a few …

Time has slipped past me while playing with our new dog and having a fun trip to the Houston show, but I have two new quilts to post here, neither of which is my usual “stuff”. First of all, while I absolutely love free-motion quilting, I’ve been wondering what it […]

Embroidered notebook cover

Update and new project

About a week ago, I posted the first part of a little quilt I’d begun in a class. Since that time, I’ve finished that top, as well as a second one. Unfortunately, I don’t particularly like the results, so I doubt that I’ll actually finish them. Here’s the first one, […]

Gemstone quilt block

Last week our local quilt guild, Desert Quilters of Nevada, hosted award-winning quilter MJ Kinman for a wonderful lecture at our quarterly meeting, followed by two days of classes. I took one of the classes, Bite-Size Gems, where we learned how to “translate” a picture of a gemstone into a […]

Saguaro against the sky

Saguaro quilt

It’s finished! Yay! I used swirls in most of the background — and there’s a lot of background in this quilt — hoping to suggest the blowing wind. By the time I’d finished them, I was royally tired of swirls! I quilted the saguaro itself with straight-ish lines interrupted by […]