Have you seen the Clover Pendant thread cutter? It's been around along time and is handy for hand sewing away from home. You can also use it when you are piecing. A student showed a neat way to use it to cut apart chain pieced units. Turn it upside down and insert the end in a spool…

Or get a round, wood finial and drill a hole in the top of it. I think this one has also had a bit of its base sawed off…

I gotta say, this works better for me than using scissors or a rotary cutter. I used it to cut apart the millions (well, not millions… it just seemed like millions) of HSTs that I made recently.

I wish I could remember the name of the wonderful quilter who both showed me this AND gave me my own wooden ball. I love it! And, because some of you may not have one of these Clover pendants, I've put them on my website. Click here and scroll down the page if you need one!

Those of you who have attended an Empty Spools seminar know how wonderful it is. If you've never been, let me tell you about it.

The 5-day seminars are held at Asilomar, a California state park on the Monterey Peninsula. Asilomar was first owned and operated by the YWCA in the very early 1900s. Click here to read more about the history. 

Currently the site is both rustic and modern. The buildings retain their turn-of-the-century charm and the plumbing is contemporary – a perfect combination :-). There are no phones or TVs in the room which do help you to focus on both the beautiful surroundings and your class.

And the surroundings are truly amazing. Asilomar is on Highway 1 in a place where the traffic is light. I love to cross the highway and walk on the paths along the coast. Asilomar is one of my very favorite places to be. I actually calm down and breathe more deeply when I'm there.

As a student, you take one 5-day class. There are a variety of teachers and classes in each of the five sessions. I am teaching an Independent Study class in Session 3, March 14-19, 2014. The last time I taught this class there were quilters working on an amazing variety of projects and it was a very stimulating room. 

I know that most quilters think of me as an appliquer and so might wonder how I could help them with a project that isn't applique. Surprisingly enough, my background in piecing, dyeing, painting, design and color is pretty deep. I very much enjoyed being able to help each person when they wanted me to. I also did my best to not 'help' when help was not wanted. 

I have been a student at Empty Spools and I can tell you that it was wonderful! I spent 5 days with Ruth McDowell where I worked on this quilt, one of my favorites.

I received my Empty Spools brochure in the mail today which means that sign-ups are underway. Classes do fill quickly so if you are interested click here for the Empty Spools main page. Click here for the registration form. It has to be printed and mailed or faxed. I would love to see you there!

My house is a vortex of activity. Honestly, you might not believe it if you were here. Rick has several crews and there are at least two crews at my house now. As Luis and Juan are toiling away on the bathroom, Roger, Carson, Miguel, and I'm not sure who else have been scraping popcorns and painting. Another crew may be working on the utility room where the current floor is being replaced with tile – or maybe that will be later today. Tile makes a lot more sense for that room and I don't know why we didn't tile it ourselves long ago.

I left at 9:00 AM to get my nails done (so that my hands look good on camera :-)) and came back to more plastic wrap. As the activity moves, so do the plastic drapes. I'm standing at the computer you see here. I'll be working on the design wall, that you can barely see the edge of on the right side of the photo, soon.

As they are whammering in the bathroom I'm moving the stuff on the shelves above my computer back so that nothing falls. These may be the only do-dads in the house that I didn't box up. Perhaps I should have.

The bathroom was emptied out on Monday…

On Tuesday, Luis and Juan made real progress…

They framed out the shower, stubbed in the plumbing, and poured the sloped concrete floor for the shower. I just looked in and the Duroc is going up on the shower walls now. I don't know when the tiling starts. Maybe tomorrow if it's not on a truck somewhere, on its way to Sherman.

In other news, Mom (who is 81 today!) has been to see a neurosurgeon. She developed hydrocephalus and had surgery to insert a shunt 13 years ago. This condition is more common that you'd think and the symptoms are sometimes overlooked in older people. At any rate, her shunt isn't working and it took all of us a while to figure out that that was happening.

Dr Luis Mignucci was recommended and we saw him Monday. He indicated that surgery would happen soon, but soon to him and soon to me may be two different things. I'll keep you all posted as things happen. But for now, Mom is out having a birthday lunch, then it's a small birthday dinner tonight at our house, and a bigger party Saturday. At 81 you ought to be able to party more, don't you think?

Regina C Said is the new owner of my extra copy of Kaffe Fasset's Quilt Road. Congratulations, Regina! Please email your shipping address to me at becky@pieceocake.com.

My preferred method of making HSTs is to start with squares. If I want a 2" finish, I cut 2 1/2" squares. Sew two squares together on the diagonal, trim away the excess, press open. Perfect HST. However, there is a lot of wasted fabric. I could sew the cutoff triangles together, but rarely do. 

I made lots of HSTs for my ugly fabric challenge and I didn't have enough of many fabrics to waste. So I tried a very cool ruler designed by Rachel Cross for Creative Grids (my favorite brand of ruler).

You can use one side of this ruler to cut 2 1/2" strips, or do it with another ruler, which is what I did. Because I wanted to work faster, I stacked 6 strips. I paired my strips right sides together so that they were already matched for sewing. FYI – I prewashed and dried my fabric so the triangles stayed stuck together well.

It helps to place the strip stack near a corner of your table (lower right in my photo).

Square off the left side of the strips.

And the right side. The strips need to be the length of the ruler, or shorter. If your strips are shorter, the left end needs to line up with the long side of one of the triangles, as I show in the next photo.

Hold the ruler firmly, keep your fingers out of the way, and cut carefully. If you have stacked strips as I did, be very sure you keep your ruler straight. If you angle it as you cut, triangle sizes will vary.

Being at the corner of your table allows you to hold and cut in the other direction more easily.

Work your way down the ruler.

Separate the stacks of triangles, turn half of them so that you can line up the flat sides as shown. The very pointy edges are away from the ruler.

Carefully place the ruler over the stacks and trim off these dogears.

My Bernina has a little 1/4" mark in front of the feed dogs. I always rely on this mark when piecing. It, together with the edge of my 1/4" foot, help me to sew accurately. 

Control the fabric as you sew.

Even though I sewed carefully, there were still some minor differences in size when I pressed them open. I trimmed some that seemed to really need it but for the rest, I worked with what I had, making minor adjustments as I sewed. Nearly all of my points matched perfectly – yay!

I would use this ruler again. It's fast and there isn't waste. For other quilts, or when I need a different size HST, I would probably start with squares as I have in the past. But it's nice to have one more way to make them! If you are interested in one of these rulers, I have them online here.

(Alert: Be sure to read to the bottom – there's a blog giveaway!)

Contractor Rick is going to start work on the master bath tomorrow. Now, there are a lot of you who will look at our master bath and wonder what is so masterful about it. It's connected to our bedroom which by default makes it the masters' bath 🙂 but it is small by today's standards.

Here's a look in the other direction:

As I said, it's small In fact, our whole house is even smaller than I thought it was. Rick calculated how much flooring we need to order and it looks like the original house plans counted the garage in the total square footage. We're at or under 1700 square feet. You know what? I wouldn't want a bigger house and I'm not just saying that because I'm not going to ever get a bigger house. It's a perfect fit for us.

Later this week the crew is going to scrape the popcorns off the ceilings in the rooms that still have them. Then they will paint those ceilings. In preparation for that, Steve and I have been packing up all of the knick knacks and wall art. I've got the quilts rolled and put away. Most of the cabinets are empty. The whole house is looking (and sounding) bare. It's odd.

As I was moving books to the garage, I weeded them out. If any of you live close enough to Sherman, all but one of these books will be in a garage sale to benefit the Sherman Symphony. There are some very good/expensive-when-I-bought-them books on quilts and quilting, art, color, and design. 

The garage sale will be from 7:30 to noon, Saturday, April 27 at 1202 South Travis, Sherman. I'm guessing there will be a lot of very good buys in addition to my books. 

I held back one book, Kaffe Fassett's Quilt Road, to give away on this blog. I liked it so much I bought two copies! So, leave a comment below and Lorna or I will randomly choose a lucky winner on Wednesday morning. And be watching – I have a few premier issues of Generation Q magazine to give away next!