April Calendar

I've fallen in love with hand applique, not that I'm good at it yet, but it's so calming and I love watching TV if there's something like this to do.

So, I had this pattern of monthly calendars quilts by Kim Schaefer that actually used machine applique, but I just don't have the expertise to make machine applique smooth and even, so I decided to do it using needle-turn applique.

I cut the 4 1/2" squares using my new Accuquilt GO! 4 1/2" strip cutter die and then turned them to cut the squares...easy-peasy and every single square matched up almost perfectly. Only two were a bit odd, so it went together so quickly.

I was going to do March, but decided there's a few steps to this and April would be a better first choice to see how goes.  There will be an umbrella and boots with flowers popping out and some huge raindrops that seem to fall from the sky! The center is all blue with rainbow colors as the border. It's not as dark as it appears on my computer.   Should be interesting, I'll share photos as I go. I wish I had a better camera, but I'm too lazy to move the photos to the computer and my iPhone and Dropbox makes it soooooooo easy.

I'm still learning applique, but it's not so bad. I have some points that shouldn't be there on the Halloween quilt that I'm doing. I'll take a photo soon to show you as I almost finished the first block of the jack-o-lantern. And explain how I am finally using my roll of Seal-n-Press that I thought I'd use with my HQ-16 as I was learning free-hand quilting...bought the Pro-Stitcher and that made my Seal-n-Press useless (of course, I could have used in the kitchen, but, hey!!!). 

I really need to do a Dear Jane block soon, too. I've decide to do handpiecing on the harder ones.

So many projects started!!