Sew Bittersweet Designs – Page 8 – Sewing and Designing in my BitterSweet World

Book Review – 180 Doodle Quilting Designs

3 Comments / Book Review / By Melissa Dunworth

I am so excited to have the opportunity to review the new 180 Doodle Quilting Designs – Free-Motion Ideas for Blocks, Borders, and Beyond book that Martingale just published! This book is so exciting because there are multiple designers who are all well known for free motion quilting and it shows some of their best designs and has directions for how to do those designs!

The book starts out reminding us of that love of doodling that we all possessed as children and gives great tips and hints on how to improve, or rather revive, your doodling techniques. It also shows how to go from designs in a book, to doodling them yourself to quilting with step by step instructions. Another thing I like is that the book has arrows on each design showing you exactly which direction to go next so that you never have to lift your pencil/needle when making these designs.

This is an example of how the designs are presented to you. Three ways showing you how to fill different spaces – triangles, squares and borders. I love how versatile each design is!

On to my top three favorite designs!

My all time favorite swirl design is in this book! I call the “Vicki Swirls”, in the book they are called “Swirlmania”. Vicki Ruebel of Orchid Owl Quilts shares how to make the design that she is most well known for and let me tell you, they are fantastic. You can see examples of Vicki’s Swirlmania in this post on her blog!

Another favorite design is Spotlight by Sheila Sinclair Snyder of License to Quilt. What I love about this design is the angles and sharp points it creates. Sometimes I want something pointy and angular rather than soft and curvy and this design gives you just that!

I also fell in love with the Organic Checkerboard design by Maddie Kertay of the BadAss Quilters Society and Spool. This design creates amazing texture and can be done continuously without lots of starts and stops. I am not a fan of burying threads so any design that avoids that circumstance is awesome in my book!

This is one book I would highly recommend for anyone that does free motion quilting, whether on a domestic or a long arm, remember, I did FMQ on a domestic machine for YEARS before I bought my long arm this past March, I can tell you that this will help your skills on both types of machines.

You can purchase 180 Doodle Quilting Designs – Free-Motion Ideas for Blocks, Borders, and Beyond directly from Martingale or any of your other favorite book retailers.

Disclosure: I was provided with a pdf copy of the book so I could review it, the opinions presented here are my own and have not been reviewed by Martingale prior to publishing this post. I also received no monetary compensation for this post and there are no affiliate links.

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Announcing Sew BitterSweet Designs Long Arm Services!

5 Comments / Long Arm Quilting / By Melissa Dunworth

Hello Everyone! I’m back after a month long blogging hiatus, goodbyes take a long time and I needed to focus on my family this past month. My husband left yesterday for a year tour in Korea with the US Army and it is time for Anne and I to start learning how to be just the two of us again. We are going at doing hard things, so we will survive this, but it won’t be easy. One of the things I’m going to do to help myself cope is start my own long arm business! I am very excited to announce that as of June 13 I have a business license and I’m ready to consult with you on how I can help you finish your gorgeous work of art!

I will have pricing information up in the next week or two and plan to offer several conveniences for you including, extra wide backing fabrics, a small stocking of solid fabrics as well as batting to make shipping on the front end less expensive for you. I hope you will consider me for your next long arm quilting project!

Here are a few of my favorite free hand fills that you may want to consider for your project. I also do 100% custom work, which you can see on this blog post here. Look for a new Long Arm Quilting tab coming to the blog soon! Please don’t hesitate to email me at melissa (at) sewbittersweetdesigns (dot) com

You can see more of my long arm projects on Instagram and on Facebook.

Have a happy Monday!

May Do Good Stitches Blocks

10 Comments / Do.Good Stitches, Personal Post / By Melissa Dunworth

I’m a bit behind. Things have been kind of emotional in my house lately, my husband is getting ready to go to Korea for a year with the army and let’s face it, that’s hard on everyone. I’m just not ready for it and to be honest, I would probably be even more concerned if I was ready for it. Separations are not easy and this is the fourth long term separation since our darling Anne was born. Let me be the first to say, that it does not actually get easier. The uncertain political situation in Korea is frightening. The fact that Anne has a true understanding of how long a year is and she knows how much she will miss, all add to the fact that this will be a tough year. He leaves one month from tomorrow, and I will probably be a bit scarce between now and then. I promise it isn’t from a place of not wanting to blog but from a place of needing to refocus my energy for a little while. In the meantime, here are my May blocks for Do Good Stitches.

These great Spider Web blocks are from .House. of A La Mode. You can find the tutorial here.

Laser Level Trimming Tutorial

9 Comments / tutorial / By Melissa Dunworth

Last week I posted a picture to Instagram of me trimming a quilt with my husband’s laser level. The idea came to me because I was thinking about Vicki from Orchid Owl Quilts using laser levels to block her quilts for quilt shows, and I thought why not use them to trim my quilts too! Talk abut accuracy!

Needless to say, it was kind of a big hit, it was shared multiple times on Facebook and got lots of likes and comments on Instagram. I thought I would give you a quick tutorial on using Laser Light Levels to trim your quilts. For really big quilts this is awesome, because you don’t need a huge line of rulers, you can use one and just keep your ruler on the laser line, moving up the quilt as needed.

Step 1: ~~Steal~~ Borrow your husband’s laser level. If you don’t have one in the house, head to your favorite hardware store and buy one. We have two, one is Black and Decker brand the other is Skil. You don’t need anything fancy, don’t spend more than $25.00.

Step 2: Get out your biggest square ruler and place it on the corner of the quilt. this will be your 90 degree angle.

Step 3: Use the laser levels to create your straight lines for cutting. Once your lines are there, bust out your rotary cutter and start cutting, you can move your ruler along the laser line and not worry about your cuts being straight.

More about the quilt in these pictures later!

Have a happy Wednesday!

Long Arm Quilting – Stripper Quilt Finish

8 Comments / 2016 Finishes, Innova, Long Arm Quilting, Stripper Quilt / By Melissa Dunworth

Stripper Quilt?!? What has Melissa been doing?

I promise, I have only been quilting, not stripping. 3 years ago I was part of a fun group of quilters who called themselves Stripper Quilters because we each made block strips for each other over the course of a year to make fabulous, fun and scrappy quilts. I pieced my top in January of 2014 and never quilted it because it was 80×80 and that was too big for me to wrestle through my domestic machine. Well now that Spike is here, I have run out of excuses not to finish it! All that’s left is the binding and given how I feel about quilt bindings…well that could take awhile, but at least the quilting is done.

It is really hard to photograph the quilting on the white background, lucky for me the backing is a nice dark blue and the quilting popped beautifully. I did this quilt with a different fill on each row so that I could show customers what different fills would like like and given them ideas for how they might like their quilts done.

The outside border has a nice wishbone motif, I wanted to be able to show lots of different ideas and what might work for different quilts. The second border has continuous feathers that go around the entire quilt. Not bad for my first attempt at feathers if I do say so myself. The first stripper row has my take on Vicki Swirls – which are done by my good friend Vicki from Orchid Owl Quilts.

Row two are my flames. One of my favorite designs so far. I love the gentle echoes and think the design has so much potential for a quilting.

Row three starts with pebbles (pictured above) and then fades into paisley (pictured below) and back to pebbles. Showing how designs can be mixed together for different textural effects.

This row was lots of fun to quilt.

Row four is this fun triangle design, they look like fireworks or starbursts to me. Can’t wait to do this design again! I love angular designs.

Row five is an echo heart design.

I really enjoyed quilting this one, I learned so much on it and even got to FaceTime my Innova rep in Italy when I had issues, talk about amazing customer service! She is on a two month vacation and took time out to help me. Truly awesome people work for Innova.

This summer I will start taking customer quilts and I am so excited about it!

Have a great day!