Welcome to Saturday Quilting Bring & Share. Bring along your projects and take a few minutes to enjoying some of the generous sharing of ideas and tips that has been going on in our Worldwide Quilting Community.

I suspect like many of you I’m a bit stuck for sharing what’s been going on in my sewing room, partly because this time of year there are a lot of pulls away from sewing and partly because the little sewing I have been doing has to remain secret 😉 I have had second thoughts about my original selection of fabrics for the Diatom QAL. I decided to substitute out the Painters Palette Solids ‘Canyon’ for the better contrasting and more lively colour called ‘Burnt Sienna’. I’m happy with the four fabrics now. All have been washed, pressed and carefully folded ready for the first block release in January.

Out: Canyon, 2nd Row Left. In: Burnt Sienna, 2nd Row Right.

Incidentally I was impressed by how very little dye was lost from these deep colours when I washed the fabrics, so that’s another tick approval for the Painters Palette Solids range.

Looking out of the sewing room window today I’m all too aware of the change back to the December default weather of wind, rain and gloom. But for the past week we’ve been enjoying a break from the rain, instead shivering in temperatures hovering around or below 0°C. Frost has remained in situ for days on end producing the most wonderful ice crystals.

A frosted spider web outside my window

Here is the selection of patchwork-quilting blog posts I hope you will find useful and/or inspiring:

Continuous bias binding method by Jenny Doan of the Missouri Star Quilt Company. I watched this video tutorial with great interest as I was planning to make binding on the bias for one of my secret projects. In the end my plan changed so I only needed a short length of ‘bendy’ binding but none-the-less Jenny’s tutorial is another to add to my digital ‘reference library’.

Using an Accuquilt die, Katie has cut and stitched a little Lemoyne Star block with no ‘Y’ seams. Got me thinking this should be possible with rulers too…

I’m not sure big corporations predicting what the colour of the year will be really influences the fabrics we use and buy but for your information: Pantone colour of 2023 is ‘Viva Magenta’; and Kona are promoting ‘Crush’ as the colour for 2023. Both are on the purple-red-orange side of the colour wheel. Maybe we all need a lift from such vibrant, warm colours to counter-act the relentless feed of gloom-laden world news?

Janine-Marie has a story to tell as she recounts the making of a unexpected ‘squirrel’ project. I enjoyed reading how she used the limiting factors of both the required finished size of the piece and the quantity of background fabric available to fuel her ingenuity and creativity.

After years of hand stitching quilt binding to the back of my quilts I began to make the move to machine stitching the binding in place. I can’t say I make a super-neat job of this so it was good to pick up some tips reading through Sarah Goer’s comprehensive tutorial ‘Machine Bind Your Quilts Like a Pro‘.

Suzy has published a quick guide to quilt marking tools. Her favourite is the humble Hera Marker. The guide gives the pros and cons associated with several other marking tools.

Still got gifts to wrap? Kirsty has been using up fabric scraps to make re-usable, drawstring gift bags. In all the pre-Christmas busyness she has kindly taken the time to post a step-by-step tutorial.

Linking with Alycia for Finished or Not Friday. She has shared a couple of colourful Quilts Of Valor she has quilted for a friend.

Happy Stitching!

Allison