My New Favorite Tool

Hi everyone!

I wanted to share a new sewing tool with you today ... awhile back I attended a product showcase at a local shop since they were demonstrating some special rulers and things.  I noticed the demonstrator using this erasable pen to mark her applique pieces.  And since I love some office supplies this immediately caught my attention! ;-)

May I present the Frixion pen by Pilot...

You can write on fabric ....

Then iron over it and it disappears!

Of course, I would recommend you test it on a scrap from your project before having a ball writing all over your project! :-)  But ... I marked my lines for this project as well as for this one (the loopy stitching in the inner borders) with this pen and it worked out great.

Edited to Add:  Apparently this pen is probably not a great idea if your project isn't going to be laundered.  Please check out Rhonda's "Lab Results" regarding the performance of this pen over the long term. :-)  Thanks Rhonda!

Do you have a favorite tool?  I'd love to hear about it.

Happy Sewing! :-)

A Random Monday Post

Happy Monday ... hope you all had a great start to the week. :)

This past weekend, I worked on a machine cover for the Sewn Spaces swap on Flickr.  My partner seemed to be into modern designs based on the info I was given and a little research that I did on Flickr, so I used some linen and some charm packs of Hope Valley that I've been hoarding for awhile.  Here's what I came up with ...

I sure hope my partner will like it.  I wish I had finished it a little differently on the sides, but when I realized what the easier method would have been, it was too late in terms the fabric I had left.

I did want to share a use for painter's tape that I discovered while quilting this machine cover.  I needed a marker to help me keep my lines straight and equidistant and decided to try folding a piece of painters tape over, leaving a little bit of the adhesive free to stick to the bottom of my walking foot.  Worked like a charm! Here's what it looked like ...

Also, I had some time to play around with mixing and matching some fabrics in the shop and saw that there's a lot of pieces that play nice together with other collections. For instance ...

This one has some Just Wing It (turquoise stripe & floral prints), Sunkissed (yellow dots) and Bella Solids (30's pink).  I have a few more "mix and match" pictures that I will share later this week. 

Also, we've put a lot of things on sale, including Bliss, Tea Garden, and more (or on further sale - Weekends & Innocent Crush at $6.50/yard) to make room for the new stuff coming in.  Stop by the shop (or Sew Lux @ Etsy) to check it out!

Happy Sewing!