Vicki's visit

After many hours of delayed planes at American and French airports Vicki arrived back to Portugal. She will be here for a month and spending first week with her friend Pam, who is her quilting buddy too. It was a very nice to see Vicki after two years.

Ursula showed her work for us, which she started making at Doris Teixeira's workshop in Caldas da Rainha. As she said that she was lost at the workshop but looking at her work she is making really good progress.


Today we had a show case. As we know that Americans lead the world with its patchwork and quilting inventions. Vicki brought for us to experiment a magic fabric.

Between magic fabric and cotton fabric she put batting. You can follow fabric pattern or just use straight or fancy stitch to sew. After sewing she used steam iron but did not touch the fabric.

It all shrunk about 30% and made a magical texture and it could be used for anything and everything.

Another great tip from her. A simple tape measure from hardware store can save you lot of money if you make bags. It has to be good quality and quite wide. If you make a big bag just double them.

While cutting a tape measure please careful, cut edges round and duck tape them in order to not to cut your bag. You bag is ready to be used and nobody will know that you used your broken tape measure or raided your husband's one.

Here is another tip from her. Ann asked how to make different binding. Measure your quilt and leave plenty of extra fabric on edges, leave 1/4" from edges and stitch binding to a quilt. Match seams and draw a line.

Sew over the line.

Open it and you will see your nice frame.

After all tips we lunched. Ann brought chicken salad with an Asian touch, Ursula cooked chicken pasta on her slow cooker, Alda made arroz doce - rice pudding. All was delicious and we had a great time on this July day.