I'm a Polyester Kind of Gal / Beauties Pageant 302

I don’t think much about thread. I’ve been buying the same brand and same weight for years, taking for granted that I could get what I wanted easily and for a fair price. How does the old saying go? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Then I heard news that Joann was closing 500 retail locations. So long, reliable, ubiquitous source of thread! Suddenly, I was open to other options. When Superior Threads offered to send me a few products to try out earlier this year, I jumped at the opportunity.*

So Fine!

One product I played around with is So Fine!, a 50-weight polyester product. I prefer polyester products because they make my machine happy. I sew on a Janome 1600P-QC, a super-fast straight-stitch machine, and she likes polyester. That preference is most apparent during free-motion quilting. For those projects, I often experience fraying and breakage with cotton thread, but polyester works without issues.

I’ve been exclusively piecing and quilting with 40-weight polyester thread for years and years, and I was skeptical of a 50-weight option. (Remember, the smaller the number, the thicker the thread. In other words, a 40-weight thread is thicker than a 50-weight thread.) I really liked it with piecing--the thinner thread made a difference! It wasn’t a night-and-day change, but I noticed that my pieces ironed flatter. 

I also quilted with So Fine! In the past, I’ve argued that a thicker thread is more forgiving, hiding the wobbles of my straight-line quilting better than a thinner thread. I sewed my latest Fire Truck Quilt with Sew Fine! in a pale gray (without marking a single line, I might add), and everything turned out beautifully. Go figure!

Sew Sassy 

The one exception to my long-held polyester-only rule was when I finished bindings by hand. For that, I’ve employed 12-weight cotton thread, and it has worked fine. I was surprised, then, when Sew Sassy, a three-ply 12-weight polyester thread was easier to use. 

With a cotton thread, I have to make sure I don’t cut off a piece longer than 15 or 16 inches: The more the thread is pulled through a quilt sandwich, the more likely the plies will loosen. That wasn’t an issue with the polyester. The integrity of the thread held up despite its travels in and out of the binding of my Windmill Weave project. 

I won’t toss my old cotton 12-weight, but from here on out, I’ll purchase polyester.

 

Metallic

I also requested a gold metallic thread. (How very un-Michelle of me!) When I went to QuiltCon 2025, there was a special exhibit of work from keynote speaker Tara Faughnan, and I was surprised to see occasional quilting lines of metallic gold thread in multiple pieces. I haven’t found the right project for the spool I have on hand, but you’ll be the first to hear about it when I do.

Are there any other polyester fans out there? I’d love to hear your thoughts on when you use different weights. Tell us all about it in the comments! 

* Please note: I received these product free. This post contains my own, unbiased opinion about them.

 

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On Gifting Quilts / Beauties Pageant 301

Over the years, people have inquired about whether I sell my finished quilts. As a policy, I don’t. I choose to gift them to friends and family instead, because it seems like the safer bet. I’d much rather pass my projects on to recipients I know and who are more likely to enjoy them and appreciate my work.

For years, then, the life cycle of my quilts was simple: I would make whatever brought me joy and then decided on a home for a project. This was a fine approach, but in retrospect, there were times when a gifted quilt seemed to fall flat. Maybe the design or palette wasn’t to the recipient’s liking? (That’s understandable, especially with my, at times, limited knowledge of the person’s taste.) Maybe she just wasn’t into having a handmade quilt in her decor? (No judgment! Such people do exist!) 

So I’ve honed my approach. Now I like to accumulate several finished quilts and then ask the recipient to pick her favorite. 

It works! Perhaps the person doesn’t get the sense that this quilt was specifically crafted for her in mind, but she leaves with a useful piece of art that, for whatever reason, speaks to her.

And that’s the process I followed recently to gift eight finished throw-size quilts to teachers who worked with my younger son through middle school.  

I have a friend who follows a similar process with family. She lays out her quilts at a family reunion, and everyone can pick a favorite or two. I conducted my process over email, contacting a few recipients with pictures of my finishes and asking them to pick a quilt before weeding out pictures of the claimed quilts and reaching out to the next small group.

It feels good to gift a quilt, and it feels even better knowing that I’ve increased the likelihood that the quilt will be used and loved by giving the recipient a say in the process.

Pictured here is one of the quilts I passed on to its forever home in the latest round of gifting. The design is Step Dance, from Not-Your-Typical Jelly Roll Quilts, and it’s a prototype I made years ago, well before I had even decided to write the book.

This project is so old that I have to plumb the depths of my memory (and email folders!) to dig up the details. The fabric is Ava Kate by Carina Gardner for Riley Blake, and Narda Junda of Maz Q’s Sewing and Quilting Studio quilted it for me in a fabulous swirly pantograph. 

(You can see the version I sewed for the book, in a collection by Sweetwater, here.)

The black in this line caught my attention—I love a fabric collection with some unexpected black in it! The striped print was an especially effective addition to the quilt design, because it accentuates the idea of ascending stairs and helped me settle on a name for the pattern.

I was working with a fat quarter bundle for this project and used as much of it as I could, even piecing the leftover blue bits together to make a scrappy binding.

What do you do with your finished projects? Do you, too, pass them on to family and friends? Do you enjoy the thrill of selling them online or at craft fairs? Or do you fold them up and put them in a closet, a dilemma to solve another day? 

 

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Kitchen Table Quilting's Fire Truck Quilt, Again/ Beauties Pageant 300

That dazed look on my face? That’s a sure sign of summer. I’ve been driving kids around, prepping for road trips, and keeping everyone busy. It’s starting to feel as if I’m not having a summer … Summer is having me! 



It’s a minor miracle, then, that I have a finish to share. This is the Fire Truck Quilt from a free tutorial by Erica Jackman of Kitchen Table Quilting. I made it for a very special one-year-old. I hope he loves it!

Before you balk at the idea of sewing a pixelated quilt, with all its little pieces and seams, this project was fun and surprisingly fast. In fact, this is the second Fire Truck quilt I’ve made over the years. (See the first one here.) 

What makes this quilt worthy of a second go-round? Aside from the fact that it’s crazy cute, it’s a fabulous venue for busting through scraps. I counted 24 different reds in this project, all of which came from my scrap bin or hoard of red fat quarters. 

Amassing the required number of red squares wasn’t challenging, but assembling the grays were. My stash contains brownish grays and purpley grays and grays with green undertones. I homed in on the shade of gray that was the most prevalent and ran with it, even breaking open a jelly roll and cutting the strips into 2.5-inch squares to meet the necessary number.

The piecing went faster with this second version. Because the design has so few colors, I was able to mindlessly chain-piece the reds and grays into chunks of four squares. From there, I would lay out a section of the quilt and sew it before moving on to the next. 

I pressed my seams to one side for this project. Naive Past Michelle thought she was doing herself a favor by pressing everything open in an effort to produce a flat and easy-to-quilt top. Present Michelle had no time for such foolishness! Pressing to the side allowed me to nest my seams, which made the process go faster and resulted in a top that was just as easy to quilt. 

I was glad I didn’t wait until the top was finished before selecting a backing fabric. I found the most perfect print for the back from On the Go by Stacy Iest Hsu and was able to steer the palette—especially the colors in the windshield—to coordinate. 

How is the summer going for you? Are you finding the time to sew or out and about, enjoying all that the season has to offer? (Friends in the southern hemisphere, I’d love to hear from you, too!)   

 

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Rosemary Quilt by Tales of Cloth / Beauties Pageant 299

Until a year ago, I had no interest in English paper piecing. I’m a girl who needs regular finishes to stay engaged, and doing anything by hand takes in the neighborhood of forever. Over time, however, I’ve seen one friend after another embrace, and create truly amazing quilts with, the technique.

Then, last summer, I was faced with some special circumstances: I had to occupy myself while my older son was taking a class an hour away from home. Because of the distance, I stayed near the class site, taking walks and reading books and starting some hand sewing. Pictured here are the fruits of my labor!

I made the Rosemary Quilt from Jodi Godfrey’s book, The Seedling Quilts. This project is not fully hand pieced and perfect for the EPP skeptic. I supersized the sample quilt from the book and made 11 EPP pieces, which I then hand-appliqued onto background rectangles. The remaining blocks without an appliqued EPP design provided an opportunity to highlight favorite prints, including some large-scale designs.

Those solid rectangles are a who’s-who of fabric designers: Kate Spain, Amy Butler, Lizzy House, Heather Ross, and Anna Maria Parry (formerly Horner), among others. For a lady who is famous (notorious?) for using white backgrounds, this Rosemary Quilt is my version of maximalism.

I handed this project to my friend Ophelia for quilting (she and I settled on an edge-to-edge pantograph called, most appropriately, Rosemary!). Then I used one of the featured prints again for the binding. 

I so enjoyed making the EPP sections for this quilt that I started another Rosemary project. I didn’t make too much progress with that second project last summer, but I was in no rush and tucked it away until now. I have two trips planned in the next few months and look forward to whiling away summer nights visiting with family and hand-stitching more Rosemary blocks.

I know some of you are accomplished EPPers. I’d love to see your past projects! You’re welcome to upload them to this week’s linky along with your more recent finishes. : )

 

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Pattern Hack! Pixelated Herringbone / Beauties Pageant 298

It was just a matter of time before I hacked one of the patterns from Not-Your-Typical Jelly Roll Quilts ...

Ever since I made the original Pixelated Herringbone, I wanted to make a version from my scrap bin.  Early this spring my sewing schedule was finally clear. It was time!

The Piecing and Fabric Pull

I let my stash and scraps dictate the palette for this version. I found two blues in my stash that worked well together, and I took them to my big bin of 2.5-inch squares. A bunch of Art Gallery scraps in blues, teals, mauves, and grays set the palette. When my scrap bin didn’t provide enough of a particular color or value, I cut a 2.5-inch strip from stash. 

The beauty of the Pixelated Herringbone design lies in the strip sets used in its construction. (It’s a pixelated quilt that takes much less time than you’d imagine!) Once I decided to make the design scrappy, however, I had to veer from my own instructions. 

The chunks of solid fabrics were still constructed with strip sets, but because I was using 2.5-inch squares from my scrap bin, the sections with prints had to be assembled individually. If I were a leader-and-ender kind of gal, I would have gone that route and sewn the prints together slowly over time. I do not sew any leader-and-ender projects, though, and instead sewed all the print units at once. This approach took longer than the original Pixelated Herringbone I made for the book, but the finished quilt top was worth the extra time. I foresee making more scrappy beauties like this one!

The Quilting and Binding

Pixelated Herringbone is a big quilt, measuring in at 64.5 inches by 80.5 inches, so instead of quilting it myself, I passed the torch to Lilo Whitener-Fey of Trace Creek Quilting to do her magic. She quilted the project with an edge-to-edge panto called Hexi Flower. 

I’ve been doing more quilting myself lately—mainly because I’ve been making smaller quilts and have had the time to quilt projects on my domestic—but my straight-line quilting would have fallen flat here. Working with a longarmer as skilled as Lilo was the way to go! 

To finish off the project, I used a stripe from Denyse Schmidt’s 2009 collection, Hope Valley. I tried multiple solids to tone down the scrappiness of the project, but the stripe really drives the idea home that this is a scrappy quilt.

Do you, too, have a giant bin of 2.5-inch squares? A scrappy Pixelated Herringbone requires 480 of them. I wish I could say this made a discernible dent in my bin, but it didn’t!

 

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Windmill Weave by Sewspicious / Beauties Pageant 297

Here in Massachusetts, we are in the home stretch before summer vacation, and I am in all-out quilting mode. My younger son is wrapping up his last days of middle school, and I will be gifting his team of teachers and therapists quilts. This has proved to be an effective motivation for getting projects bound and off my WIP list!

One project that is headed to its forever home is Windmill Weave, a design by Vickeidy Plybon of Sewspicious. The plan for this project has been in the works for a few years, so I’m especially pleased to be able to share it with you today!

The Fabric

The pattern is written to accommodate a single cut of yardage or multiple fat quarters. I knew the two-color version I wanted to sew merited something other than my usual solids, so I cut into my stash of Cirrus Solids by Cloud9 Fabrics.

I bought these fabrics years ago ... They’re lovely, yard-dyed solids, with a texture that gives them more personality than the Bella Solids I usually work with.

Because their weave is looser than other quilting cottons and because I was using white as a background, I hand-washed and machine-dried all of my yardage. In fact, I even used Retayne, a color fixative, on the Amazon yardage, to prevent bleeding.

To be honest, I’m not sure how readily Cirrus Solids are anymore, but I’ve enjoyed the projects I’ve made with them and was happy I had them on hand for this project. (See my Quilt Buzz Bingo project for another example of how I have quilted with Cirrus Solids.)

The Pattern

I am always on the lookout for a cleverly written pattern, and Windmill Weave did not disappoint! If you’re a partial-seam fraidy cat, you can construct the blocks without sewing a single partial seam. I, however, followed a supplementary blog post and sewed all nine of my blocks with partial seams. 

Truly, they’re no big deal! My only words of warning for you are these: For the partial-seam approach with the square throw, I needed to sew 18 strip sets instead of 15. You could buy more yardage to accomplish this, but I chose to get creative with how I cut my yardage. Some of the necessary strips were cut width of fabric; others were cut along the length. In the end, I’m not sure exactly how much foreground fabric I used (I had already used a bit in this quilt). If you follow in my footsteps and sew this pattern with partial seams, be sure to do all the math up front to ensure you have enough fabric on hand.

The Quilting and Binding

I was at a loss for how to quilt this top. I knew I didn’t want to quilt it myself because I thought Windmill Weave’s strong geometry, with all those horizontal and vertical lines, would benefit from something softer and swirly-er than my straight-line quilting.

Taking a cue from the backing, I selected a panto with a circular pattern ...

I considered many different scenarios for the binding. (Doesn’t it seem as if the binding can make or break a project?!) I decided that the binding fabric should either be overstated (think: lime green!) or understated (think: white!). In the end, chose the understated option: I had a light gray in my stash that played off the light gray quilting thread.

Windmill Weave was an enjoyable make. I got to use my AccuQuilt Go to cut out all those skinny strips, streamlined the quilt-making process with strip sets as directed in the pattern, and busted through long-stashed yardage in the process. I might have another Windmill Weave in me. I think I would have fun with a second go by using multiple foreground fabrics.  : )

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Ridiculously Easy YouTube Video / Beauties Pageant 296

The short version of the story I am about to tell is this: Eep! I made a YouTube video about my Ridiculously Easy Jelly Roll Quilt pattern. You can access it below ...

The longer version is that 10 years ago I posted a tutorial for my Ridiculously Easy Jelly Roll Quilt. Then 5 years ago, I converted that tutorial into a full-fledged pattern. This pattern has consistently been my most popular design, and its success is what propelled me into writing Not-Your-Typical Jelly Roll Quilts.

It was time for a little sprucing, however. I added some more illustrations to the pattern, outfitted it with my new logo, and developed some bonus resources that anyone can access.

First off is the YouTube video. Every so often someone contacts me because they work better with videos than written patterns. This video does not tell you how to sew the pattern—to cut the fabric and sew the columns, you need to have the pattern in hand. It does, however, give a broad overview and discusses the issues of selecting fabric and sewing long columns together.  (Ridiculously Easy is a column-based pattern, not a block-based one.)

 

 

(Not going to lie ... It’s painful for me to watch that video! Please ignore the glare from my glasses and every instance of “um”!)

Forthcoming is a digital coloring page on PreQuilt. I already have some designs up on PreQuilt, and you can play with coloring them without having a PreQuilt subscription. Check them out here.

To celebrate this new-and-improved version, the PDF version of Ridiculously Easy Jelly Roll Quilt is just $10 through Thursday, June 19. Pick up the Ridiculously Easy Jelly Roll Quilt pattern in the From Bolt to Beauty store or Etsy shop!

 

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Virtual Book Tour Wrap-Up / Beauties Pageant 295

Over the past two weeks, a phenomenal group of quilters have shared their thoughts on Not-Your-Typical Jelly Roll Quilts. It was so much fun for me to hear what each of them took away from their time with the book. I’m sending out a big thank-you to each of them for their time—at the keyboard, on Instagram, at the sewing machine—helping me spread the word about this pattern collection!

And to those of you who read the reviews or saw the projects and decided to add Not-Your-Typical Jelly Roll Quilts to your own quilt-book library, thank you! Your enthusiasm for my designs means more than you know. : ) 

If you missed any of the spots on the second week of the virtual book tour, here’s a recap with links to each participant’s post ...

Mary / Mary Quilts

Mary, a prolific quilter and blogger, posted her review, echoing some things I’ve heard from others. Namely, Pod Patrol might be her favorite of the 14 designs! (How are creatures that are huge and majestic in real life so dang cute when they appear on quilts?) She also called out Step Dance for one characteristic in particular: It’s the design with the least amount of background fabric, which is a plus when you’re looking to bust through stashed prints.

Read the review here!

Raylee / Sunflower Stitcheries and Quilting

Raylee of Sunflower Stitcheries and Quilting wears many hats: longarmer, pattern designer, teacher. In her review of the book, she talks about how I encourage quilters to be “choosy” with what they put in their jelly roll quilts. It’s true! Once we give ourselves permission to edit some fabrics out and add in some selections from our stashes, the creative possibilities grow!

Read the review here!

Megan / Megan Collins Quilt Design

My friend Megan is an accomplished quilt designer in her own right. (She does amazing work with curves!) I should not have been surprised, then, that after sewing a single block of Five-Star Experience as a baby quilt, she transformed her cut-offs into the cutest coasters.

See the projects here!

Deb / Quiltblox

Deb, of the Quiltblox blog and shop, set to work making her version of Neighborly. I love how she found my tips about sewing with jelly roll strips helpful. Plus, we are on the same wavelength about the tired jelly roll race: It’s time for something new!

Read about her project here!

Cheryl / Meadow Mist Designs

Great minds think alike! Like Megan, my friend Cheryl saw the potential in Five-Star Experience. She sewed one block, trimmed it out with a nice border, and bound it as a baby quilt. (This idea was nowhere on my radar screen, but I am thankful for it now!) As an author herself, Cheryl was an invaluable resource as I made my way through the book-writing process. To see her sew something from Not-Your-Typical Jelly Roll Quilts really brings everything full circle for me. 

See more pictures here!

Anne / Said With Love

I’ve been following Anne on Instagram for at least a decade, so I was tickled when she accepted the invitation to participate in the virtual book tour. And—wow!—does she have plans for the book’s patterns. In a blog post and an accompanying YouTube video, she spells out all the plans she has for not one, not two, but three book projects!

Shannon / Shannon Fraser Designs

If you’ve met Shannon in real life as I have, you know what great energy she brings to conversations about quilting, and I felt as if she were right next to me as I read her book review. Shannon sewed a block from Meow Mates, and I couldn’t love it any more. Seeing what others create with my patterns will never get old!

Read the review here!

 

Virtual Book Tour Schedule

• Sunday, May 11: Amy from During Quiet Time (@duringquiettime)
• Monday, May 12: Lilo from Trace Creek Quilting (@tracecreekquilting)
• Tuesday, May 13: Becca from Sugar Sand Quilt Co. (@sugarsandquilter)
• Wednesday, May 14: Yvonne from Quilting Jetgirl (@quiltingjetgirl)
• Thursday, May 15: Lynn from Create Whimsy (@createwhimsy)
• Friday, May 16: Mary from Mary Quilts Blog

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• Saturday, May 17: Raylee from Sunflower Stitcheries & Quilting (@sunflowerquilting)
• Sunday, May 18: Megan from Megan Collins Quilt Design (@megancollins_a)
• Monday, May 19: Deb from QuiltBlox (@deb.quiltblox)
• Tuesday, May 20: Cheryl of Meadow Mist Designs (@meadowmistdesigns)
• Wednesday, May 21: Anne from Said With Love (@said_with_love)
• Thursday, May 22: Shannon from Shannon Fraser Designs (@shannonfraserdesigns)

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