What's Up and a Quick Label Tutorial

I have been trying to get back to the nuts and bolts of my sewing.  Too much work and not enough sewing - makes a person cranky!  Do you ever get that way?  Sometimes I think it's also related to summer - there seems to be so much more to do that is not sewing.  Concerts and picnics and theater and yardwork and gardening.  I still haven't seen Magic Mike - what the heck, how did I miss that?  Now the Olympics are on and I'm trying to watch swimming and gymnastics while avoiding some of the other sports that I'm not interested in.  Do you watch the Olympics?  Will Michael Phelps win an individual medal in swimming?  Will he take gold again?  Hmmm...I guess we'll know soon enough.
 
I did finish my Picture Perfect Polaroid blocks and got them in the mail today - early!  Yea!  I went sort of crazy making these little blocks and ended up sending 90 blocks to the swap.  I have at least another 50 that I made and kept...all that chain piecing must have mesmerized me.  It takes 9 little blocks to make one block, so I should be in good shape.  Here's a picture of the blocks before they went off in the mail:

    
    I joined two other new bees (I know I said I wouldn't but one is a very small bee that is a Round Robin with wonderful people in the bee, all of whom I personally know and like.  The other is Bee Awesome, a bee where we will help each other finish up bee or swap projects - you know, where you didn't get all your blocks when it was your month, or people quit before your month or people just disappeared or they sent you blocks that you couldn't use...not bitter or anything, just making a list!).

    Several people have emailed me asking me to share my quilt labeling technique, so here goes.  When I decided it was time to make quilt labels, I went online to see what other people were doing.  Some people make hand written labels using a permanent marker.  Some people make elaborate labels with hand stitching.  Some people make their labels on the computer.  That's my choice.

    First, I suggest you buy some printable fabric sheets.  I bought these at JoAnn's with a 50% off coupon.

Then you should choose what font you want to use, whether you are going to use color on the label and what you are going to say.  I learned that I wanted my labels centered on the paper and that I wanted to fit as many labels on the sheet as possible.  I suggest you print it out on plain paper first to be sure that you like what you see.and follow the instructions on the back of the printable fabric sheets and soak and dry your printed labels before taking the next step.   I ended up with a page of labels that looked like this:

Here's a close up:

Next you cut up your labels and you can either fuse them on to your quilt, with maybe a pinked edge or you can take the next step.  I wanted to fuse the label on to fabric that I used in the quilt to make the label more visually pleasing, so I did this:

I may pink the fabric sheet before fusing it onto the Dewberry fabric.  Next I'll fuse the pinked label onto the back of my quilt.  If you wanted a more polished look to your labels, you could turn under the raw edges of the pinked fabric.  You could also stitch the label to  your quilt in addition to fusing, or skip fusing entirely and just stitch.  I'm happy with fusing onto the quilt in most circumstances, so I'm skipping the "stitch the label to the quilt" step.  It's all personal preference, so do what seems to work for you. 

I hope you found this helpful.  If you have tips about labeling to share, please leave a comment and we'll all learn together!  

Aaaanyway, that's it from the Robertson household.