Homemade bleach gel pens are easy to make—and a waste of time

Sometimes when I make a quilt with both brightly colored and white fabrics, I or the quilt recipient washes it without putting a Shout Color Catcher Sheet in the machine with it, and it ends up looking like this: My solution for this problem has usually been Clorox Bleach Pens, but my local supermarket no longer carries them and I … Read more

Sewing: How I mended a duvet cover and added ribbons so the duvet wouldn't slip

ties to anchor duvet in duvet cover

I’m still working on mending some things that Lilo the cat ate before she was taking medicine for her fabric-eating compulsion. This project is a duvet cover that she nibbled near one of the corners. I sewed a seam around the hole, at an angle that connected the side and bottom (using white thread, below). I trimmed off the excess … Read more

Sewing a sixteen-point star

16-point lone star quilt piecing

As I shared last week, my current piecing obsession is eight-pointed stars. I’ve gotten better at matching up all the points in the center, so of course I immediately decided to make things challenging again by turning one of my eight-point stars into a sixteen-point star. Usually, you would finish off an eight-point star by sewing triangles and squares into the … Read more

Piecing an eight-point star

I’ve been playing around with eight-pointed stars lately. The best tutorial videos I’ve found on the subject are done by Edyta Sitar and the Fat Quarter Shop. She shows some great methods for getting all the points aligned just right. I made this 32-piece one following some, but not all, of her advice. I was working with odd-shaped scraps of fabric, … Read more