Hi everyone, it’s a very hot and steamy day here today. A good day for spending inside where it’s cool and getting some quilting done. How are you today? I do hope this newsletter finds you well and getting some time to put a few stitches together on your latest project.

Last weekend I spent the whole weekend cutting fabric. You see, we get a lot of fabric donated to Sunshine Linus, which is a local charity that makes quilts and other comforts and donates them to those in need. Anyway, a lot of the fabric that gets donated is not particularly useful for bright children’s quilts. But we’ve worked out a way to use these fabrics just the same.

We have been cutting them into 10” squares (or 5” squares for smaller pieces) and then package them in a kit of say 35, and ask our volunteers to sew them together to make the backs for our quilts. Sure they might be florally and pretty, but they give the quilts a quilted look with a double sided appearance. We hate to see fabric go to waste, so that’s what I was busy doing on the weekend.

I continued until my wrist started to hurt and then gave it a rest. It’s amazing how lovely these backs look on our quilts.

My blue and white quilt is growing, but I’m getting a bit panicky, because I don’t have a huge amount of time to complete it. But, never-the-less, I’m pushing on, staying up a little later, getting up a little earlier. I’ll do this till I start getting grumpy and then have a good night’s sleep.

I got all inspirational last week and went surfing for blue and white quilts. I used the “google image” search engine, which brought up a bucket load of blue and white quilts. So I collected the ones I especially love and put them together into an article. Some of these images are just that, photos from quilters blogs, but some come with patterns. I hope you enjoy the browsing like I did. Here’s the link:

http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art175147.asp

We’ve had a newbie on the forum – Lucien, who has some questions about freezer paper appliqué. I don’t know much about this technique as I’m a needle turning appliqué quilter. Please pop over to the forum if you can help Lucien with her queries. Here’s the link:
http://forums.bellaonline.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/745768/New_to_Applique#Post745768

Oh, BTW, you might be interested to know that I’ve started editing another site on Bellaonline – The Voice of Women. I’m the new Editor for the Australia site! Yep, a pretty good match, me thinks. I’m in the training phase at the moment. If you’re interested in seeing what’s happening over there, here’s the link:
www.bellaonline.com/site/Australia

Now, onto my weekly collection of goodies. You might be interested to know that I’ve collected 68, A4 pages of links for you since I started in 2007. Wow!! I’m thinking about putting them into an E-Book. What do you think? Anyway, enjoy what I’ve got for you this week.

http://madquilter.blogspot.com/2010/01/newborn-petal-bib-free-pdf-sewing.html a too cute bib for a newborn

http://www.planetjune.com/blog/offset-square-wrist-pincushion-tutorial/ a good tutorial for a wrist pincushion (I thought if I hide it amongst the goodies, you won’t notice LOL).

http://www.lorennabuck.com/products/sun-hat a great sun hat pattern and tutorial, especially for those southern Hemispherians

http://sew4home.com/projects/storage-solutions/930-travel-accessories-cosmetics-a-toiletries-case love these rolly nesters.

http://mousechirpy-polkadotpineapple.blogspot.com/2008/06/tutorial-folded-hexagon-yo-yo.html this is a pretty hexagon

http://buzzingandbumbling.blogspot.com/2011/09/easy-3-d-starburst-tutorial.html What a great idea, and easily translated to a patchwork quilt

http://sewtimeless.net/?p=643 an interesting article about teenagers getting into patchwork.

http://meetthedubiens.blogspot.com/2011/09/fall-button-branch.html such a pretty idea and I looooove buttons

That’s all from me this week. Keep those fingers busy and have a great week.

Cheerio for now

Judie Bellingham, Quilting Editor
http://Quilting.bellaonline.com

One of hundreds of sites at BellaOnline.com