Field Trips in Fiber - Adventures in quilting, hand dyed fabric and fiber art.

Mistyfuse Cyber Monday Special

I know that a lot of you love Mistyfuse as much as I do so I wanted to let you know about this great Cyber Monday deal on Mistyfuse products:

 

Cyber Monday Mistyfuse Deal starts on Sunday!

20"x 10yd package of each: White, Black and Ultraviolet Mistyfuse, plus a Bonus Goddess Sheet. Shipping US/48 included (small charge elsewhere). $100 (Normally $127)
or
20" x 10yd Package of White Mistyfuse and a 20"x 2.5yd package of each Black and Ultraviolet Mistyfuse and a Goddess Sheet. Shipping US/48 included (small charge elsewhere). $50 (Normally $73.50)

To get the deal: Order the packages online at Mistyfuse.com at the regular price and check out. We will refund the difference and ship out the Bonus Goddess Sheet along with the packages.

Lickety Grip product review

I showed you a photo of my first set of Christmas postcards yesterday. You may not appreciate the miracle that those cards represent for me. The miracle is having some cards done before Thanksgiving! I still have 2 more sets to make but I am way ahead of last year.

In fact, this whole Christmas season is ahead of schedule. I don't buy many gifts so I like to find special things for the gifts I do buy. You know it's always hardest to find gifts for friends. This year, though, the gifts have found me! It's been weird but I have really just happened on the perfect gifts for 2 of my friends. It's as if the gifts found me and I didn't have to look for anything! I hope the rest of the season goes so smoothly.

Back to the point of this post.

When I make postcards I often do some free motion quilting on them. When I do FMQ on my domestic machine I usually use some sort of gripper pads under my hands. But that's really awkward on small projects.

For those projects I use Lickety Grip. Have you heard of this stuff? It's been around for a long time. It's a clear, solid conditioner for your fingers. It like licking your fingers for improved grip except that your fingers aren't wet and there's no residue on your project. 

I really helps to reduce the stress on your hands and fingers.

You can see that it looks like a clear wax but it isn't. It's hypoallergenic and will not stain or damage your fabric.

This open box is my own container and I've had it for YEARS. You just open it and rub your fingers in the container and you are good to go.

I also use this on very large projects. When I am sewing on a binding I find that the bulk of the quilt can be hard to maneuver and I often use my entire left forearm to control the bulk of the quilt. One day I spread some Lickety Grip on my left forearm and it helps tremendously to reduce the stress on my arm and shoulder.

I'm not affiliated, I just like the product.

Book Review - Complete Photo Guide to Felting

There aren't a lot of new quilting and fiber art books on the market that I think are exceptional. I think a lot of them are just books that are quickly put together to take advantage of someones new "celebrity" status or to quickly get in on a current movement.

I'm very happy to tell you about one that is an exception. The Complete Photo Guide to Felting by Ruth Lane is exactly what it says it is.....COMPLETE.

If you are interested in any aspect of felting you will find this book to be a great resource.

The book is 231 pages with over 800 photos. So that will tell you how well illustrated the book is.

Here's a page from the needle felting section to show you the clear illustrations.

The book covers wet felting, nuno felting and needle felting.

If you need a copy for your library, you can order a signed copy from Ruth here.

Ruth also sent me a copy to give to one of my lucky readers. To enter just leave a comment on this post and I will draw a winner on Wednesday, November 7.

My friend Becky is famous

If you participate in Barbara Brackman's block programs then you know my friend Becky. She tests Barbara's blocks for the rest of us. She first did that for the Civil War program last year and is doing it again this year for Grandmother's Choice. You can see her blocks in the blog post each week.

Becky's quilt is included in Barbara's new book, Civil War Sampler. C&T was developing a new product while Becky's quilt was there and they decided to use her quilt as the art for their new Fast2Clean Microfiber cloths. Isn't that cool? This would never happen to me.

In addition to the general coolness of knowing that's Becky's quilt, this is a cool product. It has the large microfiber cloth like any other cloth for cleaning eyeglasses. But it also has 3 small cloths that you can see at the bottom of the page.

These have static cling backs so they will stick to the bottom of your laptop, tablet or smartphone.

The smallest one is the perfect size for my Droid and I can stick it to the back so I always know where it is.

Neat, huh? (I mean both the product and my friend!)

Product Review - Quilt Album Software

Did you set a New Year's resolution to get more organized? Do you have your quilt photos all over the place and not easy to find? Do you want to be able to print custom quilt labels or business and greeting cards with images of your art?

If you answered yes to any of those questions you need to check out Quilt Album software. Pat Sloan asked me to review the software for them and I'm happy to report that it is a very nice tool.

This is the entry screen. It's very simple and straight forward to use. You can enter all sorts of data about your quilt and you can define up to 10 categories for your quilts. The categories allow you to sort your quilts for printing directories.

You can enter multiple photos for a quilt using the "Duplicate the Quilt" button in the upper left corner. On thispage I am entering a detail shot of my On A Whim quilt.

One of the best features of the software is all of the printing capabilities. You can print quilt labels, quilt summary sheets to store in a paper album, and notecards and business cards with your quilt images.

The nice thing about the print function is that the software will tell you exactly what type of paper stock you need to print. On this screen I am setting up to print some horizontal note cards. All of my quilt info is on the back of the card and I can customize that as much as I want.

The Quilt Album folks are offering you a great opportunity to get this software. It's already reasonably priced at $29.95 but you can get a great limited time offer.

Do you see the $5 discount for the software in this ad? That's a 16% discount off the retail price. But wait, they are giving my blog readers an even better limited time offer! From now until January 12 you will get $10 off! That's a whopping 33% discount and makes the software less than $20! You can't beat that for documentation software. After January 12 the discount reverts back to $5.

Go to Quilt Album and check it out and use code AGG-ES for your discount and get organized for 2012.