Crafty news...

First of all, I have to confess that I am in love with the Singer man. When I upgraded my sewing machine about a year ago I bought an all-purpose electronic Singer. I wanted something that would give me lots of stitch options and do all of the settings automatically so I couldn't mess them up. And I wanted a needle down position. That's easy, right? Well, it was. I found many machines that fit this description and ended up getting a Singer. At that time I had no idea I would start quilting. And also had no idea that it would even matter. So I sewed along happily for about 6 months loving my new machine. And then I started quilting. And then I started hearing things like "walking foot", and "free-motion foot" and "quarter-inch foot". What? Why all the feet? But like a good quilter I bought them and started using them. It was terrible! All of a sudden, the machine that I loved - turned on me. Nothing was working right any more. My stitches were terrible and weird. I was not happy. So I marched myself down to the Singer man and asked if he could fix it. When I used my all-purpose foot - all was right with the world. But when I added quilting attachments - bad things happened. Mr. Singer fiddled around and basically reworked my macine into a "quilting machine". He worked his magic, changed around several of my features so they would play nicely with the quilting things. And then showed me how to change the settings and tensions to trick it into working with the free motion foot. And very patiently spent more than an hour letting me do it myself and showing me how each feature works. And did it all - for free. Because he has 4 grown daughters and is just a nice man who I guess had pity on me. But now I am a customer for life. I bought my sewing machine from him, all the feet from him and now I'm pretty sure I won't even go to JoAnn's for bobbins if I can get them from Mr. Singer. Love that man.

So now that I am trying to be a quilter I spend a lot of time online looking at quilts and quilt blogs. Through this process I have discovered the coolest thing - Online Quilting Bees. A group of quilters get together from across the country (and internationally!) and each are assigned a month. When it is your month - you decide what type of block you would like made and send out fabrics to everyone else in the bee. They take your fabrics, create a block according to your specs and then mail it back to you. And poof! you have 12 beautifully created quilt blocks ready to turn into a quilt. I thought it would be fun to join such a group but I am painfully new to this craft and had large fears of creating a mess. While playing online I happened upon a bee that was needing new members. I divulged my lack of quilting experience and they let me join anyway! September is the first month and I am SO exicted to get to do this. I have four weeks to create one block. Surely I can handle that, right? Anyway, part of the process is I have to post pictures online. I started a flickr account for this purpose, but I'll probably be posting here as well. I think our first assignment is a "wonky house". Wish me luck :-)