I still get a lot of emails asking about my GO! Cutter, so I thought I’d pass this information along!

AccuQuilt’s Black Friday Sale – Lowest Prices Ever!

AccuQuilt is giving its blogger friends a sneak peek of their upcoming Black Friday sale! As you all know, Black Friday has become a great shopping tradition among Americans everywhere. However, a majority of consumers now prefer to shop online to escape the dangers of stampede and the hassles of long lines at stores. If you can’t find the items you want, it’s easy to hop from one store website to the next without being disappointed. Savvy online shoppers know how to get the most out of Black Friday sales by utilizing blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other websites to get the inside track on tremendous sales.

AccuQuilt is offering the lowest prices ever on some of their most popular items plus special Daily Deals you don’t want to miss! AccuQuilt’s Black Friday sale begins on Wednesday, November 24^th and ends on Cyber Monday, November 29^th! Don’t miss out – visit accuquilt.com starting Wednesday to place your order!

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Say Hello to GO! Baby™

AccuQuilt’s new arrival brings you a NEW way to GO! The AccuQuilt GO! Baby™ Fabric Cutter is an extension of the GO!® family of products and is an ultra-portable, affordable and adorable fabric cutter for quilters and fabric crafters. The GO! Baby Fabric Cutter has the same cutting performance as the original GO! Fabric Cutter and is just as safe, accurate and fast. At only $139, and with a more compact design, the GO! Baby is perfect for the beginner and occasional quilter. The GO! Baby is compatible with all GO! dies except for 10″ x 10″ and 10″ x 24″ dies.

Key features and benefits:
- Consistent, accurate cuts—up to 6 layers at a time
- 90% faster than traditional cutting
- Lightweight—only 8 pounds
- Create perfect appliqué in the turn of a handle
- Reduce fabric waste
- No cut fingers or sore backs
- Create endless design options
- Minimal space needed for storage
- Portable—no electricity or batteries needed

Look how tiny and cute it is! If price has kept you from getting a GO! Cutter in the past, this could be just what you need!

Hop on over to AccuQuilt if you’re interested in pre-ordering!

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One of the activities that each girl I took to camp is supposed to do daily is write in her journal. We decided to make it a little more fun by giving them a specific camp journal. We were also on a tight budget, so we needed to keep it cheap.

This time of year, you can often find composition books for next to nothing (my camp assistant picked ours up for 11 cents each!!!), and we needed 25. So, fancying up a composition book seemed like our best option.

I sat down and searched online, but everything I found was either paper covered or involved sewing. I wanted fabric and I wanted no-sew (geez I’m picky). After a little trial and error, here’s what I came up with.

Supplies:

Composition book
Fabric (cotton works best for Mod Podge-ing)
Mod Podge
Glue stick
Foam brush
Cardstock

Cut/rip/whatever 2 pieces of fabric 1-2” bigger than your composition book. My pieces were 7.5” X 11.5”. You’re going to “hem” one of the long edges (that will butt up against the black spine of the book) using a glue stick.

Run the glue stick along your edge on the wrong side. I did the bottom one.

Fold up approximately 1/4” along the edge and press down to glue in place.

Do this to both pieces of fabric.

Brush some Mod Podge on the front of the composition book, right up next to the black spine.

Position your fabric evenly and push your glue hemmed edge right up next to the black spine. Smooth the fabric out on the Mod Podge.

Flip the fabric back and spread Mod Podge on the rest of the composition book.

Smooth and press in place.

I put a piece of wax paper between my cover and the pages. Mod Podge doesn’t stick to wax paper. Then I flipped it over and did the same thing to the back of the composition book.

Open the cover and glue down the outside edge.

I found it worked best to glue down a small angled corner section next, like this:

And then finish up with the top and the bottom.

Leave the wax paper inside and flip the book over and do the same to the back cover.

Once it’s dry, take 2 pieces of cardstock and cut them slightly smaller than your composition book.

I tried Mod Podge to glue the cardstock down but it was bubbly and messy. I used some Terrifically Tacky Tape and it was fabulous, but also expensive. If I were making one or 2 journals, this would be my adhesive of choice. For 25? I used a tape roller.

I ran some tape down the edges of the cardstock and then placed it inside of the cover. I smoothed down the edges with a bone folder because Martha Stewart told me to use one.

Do the same to the back cover.

You can stop there:

(You should probably wait for the glue to dry before you take pictures…)

(See? That looks awful!)

Or, you might want to embellish. The journals I did for camp were all the same boring off-white.

AccuQuilt GO! to the rescue! I cut out dozens and dozens of flower shapes using my Funky Flowers die. If you don’t have a GO! Cutter, you could easily cut out flower (or other) shapes by hand. And provided you’re not making 25 journals, it might even be sort of relaxing.

Once we got to camp, we let each girl personalize her journal by Mod Podge-ing flowers to the cover.

Here’s my example:

And here are a few of the ones the girls did:

If you make one, I’d love to have you add it to the Flickr group!

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How fun was last week??? (I think most of you enjoyed it…aside from that one comment that was all “What’s with all the giveaways? I kind of hate it.”)

HUGE thanks to everyone who provided items for the week of giveaways! Be sure to check the WINNERS POST throughout the week to see if you won something!

As for me, I’m going to camp with the teenage girls from church this week. Yikes. I’ve got some stuff scheduled in advance, so you won’t even miss me.

*************

This project was inspired by this sweater from DownEast Basics.

I immediately thought of my GO! Cutter and AccuQuilt’s GO!Funky Flowers die. I though a knit would be a good choice for this project, since it doesn’t fray. More on that in a bit.

I cut strips of my knit yardage (this color came from Hobby Lobby but you could use an old or clearance t-shirt to keep the cost way down) and then folded it in eighths. There’s no reason for the eighths other than that’s how long my strips were. (And I wanted to see if my GO! Cutter could handle that many layers.)

I placed the folded fabric over the smallest flower on the die,

rolled it through, and ended up with this.

Perfection! Not even a string to trim! Seriously…I was so excited that I got on the AccuQuilt Facebook page and posted about it right then. I’m a dork.

I cut about 80 flowers total.

I stuck a flat cheap-o cutting board from IKEA inside the sweater (so I wouldn’t have to stick my hand in for pinning) and started placing and pinning flowers.

I tacked each one down in the center using the stitch on my machine that can allegedly sew on buttons. (I did it once in my “getting to know your machine” class, but I don’t dare try it again.)

Then I did another row.

And so on and so on.

I really wanted that to be the end of it. I even made Macy try on the sweater and head outside for pictures. But look:

Wadded up pieces of aqua toilet paper stuck to a sweater. How nice!

So, I came back in and did a little playing around. I decided that if I wanted it to look how it looked in my head, I was going to have to do some more sewing…and I mean A LOT more sewing.

Starting where I’d tacked down each flower, I sewed out to near the end of each petal. That’s 5 petals per flower times 80-ish flowers. You don’t need to be a math nerd to figure out that it took a freaking long time. So long, in fact, that I quit feeding my kids and Macy nearly died from malnutrition.

(Or, she just really hates me taking her picture…you decide.)

Good thing I love the way it turned out!

If you don’t have a GO! Cutter and you want to try this project, the flowers I cut out are about 1.5” in diameter.

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In the spirit of AccuQuilt and their AWESOME GO! Cutter giveaway (which you can still enter through Friday by going here), I wanted to share another project with you. And I wanted it to be something non-quilty.

I came up with the Tumbler Skirt.

***If you don’t have a GO! Cutter or have access to one, you can cut the tumbler blocks yourself….They’re just trapezoids. They measure 6 1/2” high. The top is 3 1/2” wide and the bottom is 6 1/2” wide.***

First, I want to show you how I cut the tumbler blocks. The light in my kitchen was awful that day, so excuse the crap-tacular photos.

The GO! Cutter box says it can cut up to 6 layers of fabric and I decided to put that to the test. I folded my fat quarters into sixths like this:

Then I gave it a quick press with the iron.

My tumbler die looks like this:

I’m going to place my fabric right on top of the outline you can see vaguely. That’s where the blade is.

Then I put my cutting mat on top.

And rolled it through my GO! Cutter.

The verdict on cutting 6 layers of fabric at once? Over all it was good. There were a few cuts where I had to snip a couple of threads that didn’t quite get cut, but it was still WAY fast, even with the snipping.

If you want to make your own Tumbler Skirt, you’ll need to measure the waist of the intended wearer, and round up to the nearest multiple of 3”. (The finished top width of the tumbler piece is 3”.) That is how many tumblers you’ll need for your top tier.

You’ll need double that number for your 2nd tier. For a shorter skirt or younger child, 2 tiers may be long enough.

You’ll need double the 2nd tier number for your 3rd tier.

And so on and so on and so on.

My top tier was 9 tumblers. The 2nd tier was 18 tumblers. And, my 3rd tier was 36 tumblers. You’ll also need a short (4”should be sufficient) zipper. I used double fold bias tape for both the hem and the waist line, but you don’t have to.

Sew the blocks for each tier together (1/4” seams), small sides up. On the top tier, sew only the bottom 2 or 3” together on the last seam. This is where the zipper will go.

The finished bottom width on each tumbler is 6”, aka double the finished top width. So, when you connect your tiers, you can line up seams nicely…2 tops for every bottom.

Install your zipper and have the wearer try it on. It will be too big. That’s good! You’re going to make some darts to get a custom fit. I darted (is that even a word?) every seam about 3/8”. I started on my seam line about 1/3 of the way up and then veered off so I was 3/8” over at the waist line.

Have the wearer try it on again. Now it should fit. If not, re-evaluate your dart situation and try again.

This is when I applied bias tape to the waist line and the hem. I’d recommend it for the waist for sure, but you could just hem the bottom and be fine. And I still need to sew an eye hook on the waistband, but I wanted to get pictures before it got dark.

It’s super twirly, too.

So twirly, in fact, that you might land in the bushes about .5 seconds after your mom takes this picture:

So, try something different! Make a skirt out of a quilt block! You might really, really like it.

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The nice folks at AccuQuilt sent me a GO! Cutter to try out. It arrived Thursday and I could hardly wait to get started. Fortunately, my friend and neighbor (she still harasses me about referring to her as *just* my neighbor last time I mentioned her) Tam over at Sew Dang Cute sells fabric….like at her house. Friday morning she and I plopped down on the floor in her sewing room and surrounded ourselves with bolts of fabric and started talking and diagramming.

Here’s what I came up with:

(Thanks to my lovely assistant Keller for being the quilt holder.)

I used both the GO! Critters set and the GO! Strip Cutter –2 1/2” for this quilt, along with a couple of other random cuts.

The finished size of this quilt is about 36” wide by 41” tall…a good baby/throw size. All of the strips were cut the width of the fabric, so there’s pretty much no waste.

Using your GO! Cutter and the 2.5” Strip Cutter, cut 4 2.5” strips of the white fabric (W). You’ll also need a 15.5” strip of the white fabric for the center section (BIG WHITE).

Cut 2 3.5” strips of your blue fabric (B). I used Just Dreamy Blue Dots.

Cut 2 5.5” strips of your floral fabric (F). I used Just Dreamy Cream Large Floral.

Using your GO! Cutter, the Critters set and fabric with fusible web already attached (yes, really!!!), cut out 3 butterflies and 3 dragonflies (more or less….personal preference). The red is Make Life’s Texture Apple. The orange is Just Dreamy Orange Dots.

You could, of course, trace and cut out the appliques the old fashioned way…it’ll just take you WAY longer.

Using your GO! Cutter and the 2.5” Strip Cutter, cut 5 2.5” strips for binding. I used Make Life in Shine Apple.

I backed the whole thing with some more of the Just Dreamy Blue Dots (about 40”).

Assemble your strips in the following order, using 1/4” seams:

W F W B (BIG WHITE) B W F W

Press the seams towards the non-white fabrics.

Position your Critter cut outs as desired and fuse in place. Stitch around the edges. I used a tight zig zag. I’m not a fancy shmancy quilter, though….I usually just make stuff up as I go. If you know the “correct” way to do this, do that instead.

Your quilt top is done!

Quilt as desired.

I used a walking foot for the lines in the white strips. I used a darning/free motion foot for the squiggles in the large white section. I’d never used either before (insert embarrassed face here). There’s a bit of a learning curve on the free motion foot, but I’ll definitely be using it more often.

I attached the binding using this method, from Moose on the Porch Quilts.

I love it a lot.

I’ve also got the 6 1/2” GO! Tumbler. I think I’ll play with that one next. I feel like the giant stack of Nicey Jane sitting on my sewing table may finally have a purpose!

Thanks, AccuQuilt, for a fun new toy!

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