Bradie from A Quilty Kind of Girl will be hosting a Summer Star Sampler Quilt Along, starting July 6th (hey that’s my birthday!).

Tutorials will be available every Tuesday on Bradie’s site with instructions for two blocks per week, followed by the center medallion, then borders. Check the blog post to download the fabric requirements.

I’m in love with this pattern! I hope I can keep up with the instructions this summer and have a fabulous quilt done at the end. I haven’t decided what fabrics I want to use. I might go brights and use my hand-dyed fabrics I made last week. Or perhaps something warm and calming with browns, beiges, blues, burgandy and green. I’ll pull some fabrics this weekend.

The centre medallion is gorgeous, but for me I find it SCARY!! I know Bradie writes amazing tutorials, so I’m not too worried about tackling it when the time comes.

Join the fun!! Are you going to Quilt Along with Bradie (and me)?

I have a confession, I have yet to start my “New from Old” quilt, for the Alliance of American Quilts contest. It’s due at the end of May. I plan to work on it when I return from Spring Quilt Market, and get it in the mail just in time to meet the deadline. Talk about cutting it CLOSE!

What about you? Are you entering the contest? All Quilting Gallery fans will be entered into a draw for a special fabulous prize package. Check out this post for more info.

Here’s a video of the latest quilts they’ve received. They are all fabulous.

This week’s Shout Out Thursday blogger is The Quilt Rat. She’s a fabulous quilter and doodler and always has inspiring projects she’s working on. She shares her trials and errors and I’ve learned a lot just by reading her blog the past several months.

We had fabulous weather in Ontario over the Easter weekend. Check out the sun printing experiments she did. I love the safety pins.

She participates in the Creative Prompt Project, and her interpretations of the weekly prompt in doodles are amazing. Here are a few: Steam, Pear and Quiet, and Hand.

You’ll also want to check out this post on Dryer Sheet Applique. I’ve been saving my used dryer sheets for a future project.

UPDATE: Enter for your chance to win a postcard with one of the Quilt Rat’s doodles on it. I’m thrilled to be getting one too. Thanks!

Have you stumbled upon a great blog lately? Shout Out on your blog and don’t forget to leave a comment at the Quilter’s Daily blog along with a link to your post so we can check it out too!

Stay tuned for next week’s Shout Out Thursday, it might just be you!

For the past several weeks, I’ve been inviting you to blog along with us over at the Quilter’s Daily blog along. We’ve had such great fun, but now it’s time for a change, a good change!

Each Thursday, I’m going to feature one of the fabulous bloggers from the Quilting Bloggers directory. With just under 4,000 blogs to choose from, I’ll have more than enough content to fill this spot. (I’d need 77 years to feature everyone, yikes!)

My first ShouT OuT Thursday blogger is Linda M. Poole. I had the extreme pleasure of taking an applique class with Linda last week at the Lancaster AQS show.

It was such a wonderful class, and I learned several new techniques. She showed us how to make itty bitty 1/8″ bias binding for adding JAZZ to our applique or pieced units, and I’m totally hooked. I can’t wait to give it a try.

I think Linda’s tagline, Where the Magic of Applique, Quilting and Everyday Life Happens, sums up her blog perfectly. I don’t know where she finds them, but she features such fabulous photos of cool quilty stuff and COLOUR that will leave you totally inspired and in awe. Here’s one from her latest post:

And another one from an earlier post:

You’ll definitely enjoy the antics of Zoie:

If those days filled with April showers are getting you down, I’m sure you’ll enjoy a visit to Linda’s blog for some inspiration. (Isn’t her new seahorse fabric gorgeous?)

Have you stumbled upon a great blog lately? ShouT OuT on your blog and don’t forget to leave a comment at the Quilter’s Daily blog along with a link to your post so we can check it out too!

Stay tuned for next week’s ShouT OuT Thursday, it might just be you!

The fabulous ladies from the Fat Quarter Shop are organizing a silent auction to raise funds for charities helping the victims of the Haiti disaster.

They have 25 fabulous items that have been donated. Head over to the Jolly Jabber blog to see the items and place your bid. The auction ends Jan. 29th at noon (CST).

Here are a few photos of the gorgeous quilts available. You can click on each photo to go to the auction page.

Pennsylvania Dutch Sampler Quilt

Ice Cubes Baby Quilt

The Bunny Run Quilt

Dora S'mores Baby Quilt

My name is Darla and I am one of the new bloggers out there. I am a beginner quilter with a lot of quilting and blogging ambitions, and a unique perspective.

Rather than spending a lot of time talking about my blog Scientific Quilter, I wanted to share a (long) story of my experiences of the past year that lead me to be a quilting blogger.

I started quilting when I received a free sewing machine from work in February of 2009 and somehow in my head I had thought you had to have a sewing machine to be a quilter. I’ve wanted to be a quilter for several years, but kept putting off that idea because I kept putting off the idea of buying all the supplies.

A year earlier I had purchased a book on quilting – Your First Quilt Book by Carol Doak and it sat in my car for most of that year while the quilting idea kept bubbling up. Once I got the sewing machine, the book was opened and read cover to cover.

I used the book and some tutorials I found on the internet to get through the blocks of my first quilt, trying out different colors at the store. I also checked out several books from the library and started reading them cover to cover, starting to figure out what it was about the quilts that I liked. I found the local quilt store and started looking in wonder at all the beautiful designs. I created a second quilt made only of squares, but like many projects set it aside for a while and signed up for a machine quilting class at the quilt shop.

In April or May, I started thinking about using my iPod for more than music from my own CDs and I opened up iTunes, typed in the word quilting into the music store and here were all these quilting podcasts. I had a lot of questions about what I was seeing at first. What was a quilting podcast? How did I download it? Were they free?

I clicked on Alex Anderson’s Quilt Connection and hit the play button on the first episode. Someone was going to talk about their love of quilting for a period of time. Amazing. I was hooked immediately. I hit subscribe on the podcast and found the podcast section on my iTunes (on the left side) and started downloading episodes. And they were free! I loaded them onto my iPod the same way I did for my music and went out and cleaned my car listening to the podcast with headphones. While I was doing other things, I was learning about quilting!

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