Quilt Labels…

I know that quilts should all have labels. Most of mine are luck to get a signature and year on them. I am NO good at any of this. I have a difficult time coming up with the text, I have terrible hand writing, and I have no easy way to make them.

Now I there is a new baby quilt to make, word is one of my coworker’s wife is due at the end of summer, and Tony’s birthday quilt is bound. So….. if I’m going make labels now’s the time.

I am planning to spend some time designing a couple of labels and see about printing them on my ink jet printer. I know that they should be set with some liquid and/or heat. I’m putting my daughter the chemist on it. She should be able to come up with something inexpensive to use.

And because a post is just BORING without a pic – here is Tony’s quilt “Holes in the Barn”. I think its pretty appropriate for him, he’s just a farm boy at heart.

A Raffle with Sooooo Many Prizes!

Jean from the HGTV message board is dedicated to charitable endeavors. This year she is working to raise money for Muscular Dystrophy by raffling off at least 35 QUILTS! 

THREE chances for $5.00.

Click the button for more information and to see all the great quilts.  Eye candy for sure!

Various quilters from the HGTV board made these quilts in answer to Jean's annual challenge. Part of her challenge each year is that the quilt  be donated to charity.Jean works tirelessly to  give back and I would love her to be able to achieve her goal...

To donate by Paypal, Credit card or arrange mailing of checks contact Jean at jayardi@wi.rr.com. One look at all those gorgeous quilts coupled with the great cause will certainly have you making a generous contribution. If you prefer, contact me (dkbrown04@yahoo.com) and I will make the arrangements for you with Jean.

Is it the end of April yet?

I am getting ready for a retreat I will be going on. Ok, its over a month away, but these ladies like there games, so I need to get fat quarters and strips ready to go.

This prep work does make a mess of the cutting table.

Here are my FQs for the Neapolitan game. I also have the neutrals, and dots/dashs sorted. I did find 2 Black/White prints, but I will need to find one more. There are other categories, but I’m not sure if I’m going to play all the games. We will have to see how much time I have to gather up fabric.

But there are 2 games of Strip Poker – NO not clothes, 2.5 inch strip!!!. I can get into this! Its off to find more material. ……

Its back to quilter A.D.D.

I should be binding the hole in the barn Quilt, or borders on the Christmas Lights quilt, but NOOOOOO   I started another quilt. 

I have been making these blocks for a few weeks but Sunday I put together the first two sections.

  

An update

I don’t think I ever posted my FINISHED Jacobs Ladder quilt.  I love how it turned out.

Here are some pics of the quilting.  I know it’s hard to see. (click to see a little bigger pic)  This is my third go at freehand fans, and I need LOTS of practice!!

 

The dog days of March?

First just because their too cute.  Did I say that!

Morgan never wants to get up, this morning I did not make the bed (who am I kidding, I rarely make the bed!)  Anyway,      Here she is….

And here is Tigger.  She likes a nest, so I just make a pile of the old dog beds in the corner and she’s happy.  I don’t like the looks of  this, so in the summer everything gets washed and is put up until it get cold again. 

Editing Photos – talk about boring….

I have been asked by many of my friends and family if I would teach them how to edit photos for various uses.   I do NOT profess to be an expert, and there are MANY things that I just don’t know.   This is probably going to be a rambling, but I to avoid a lot of that…

Picture size:
In general, I have been taught to always take pictures with the highest setting that my camera can take.  Then edit down depending on the use.  And as long as you have the space on your camera or phone this is a good rule to use.

HOWEVER…. there’s always a but….  There are issues that should be taken into consideration if you are going to ALWAYS follow this rule.

1. First, as I stated in the rule, High setting mean large files.  If you have a 1 gig SD card in your camera, and you do not have time to download the pics;  taking a lot of 10 or 12meg pictures will limit greatly the number of pics that will fit on that card before you need to delete some. 
   
   Or if you have a nice size card, but have not downloaded all the pictures in over 3 years you may need to delete something to get that special picture when the time comes.  Ask me how I know this,  ugh….
   
2. Typically saving those large files will take some time.  The camera has to write that to its storage devise.  If your taking pics at your sons first little league game, and you take the first picture of him running down the third base line.  You may miss the pic of him crossing home base while the camera saves the first picture. 
   
   If your taking pictures of the perfect rose growing in your garden, you can probably wait to take the next one.
   
3. Then there’s working with those monster files.  Computers are much more powerful these days, but sending this files in email is just inconsiderate and posting them on websites and blogs can make a page load REALLY slow.

 

So why do you want larger files?

• The pictures are typically clearer, both on the screen and in print.
• There is more detail captured in the picture – hair on dogs, stitches are clearer on my quilt pics, and the colors are just brighter!
• And my favorite, you can always edit out detail, but you can NOT add it back in.
• If your printing 5x7 and 8x10 prints – the larger the file the better.  And remember, anytime you crop or resize your picture you are reducing not only the size of the file, but you are deleting some of the detail. 
  NOTE: If you delete enough detail, the print will be fuzzy, grainy or both.

 

What are these “settings”?  I don’t know if I can do this justice, but I will try to keep it simple.

Resolution: this is the number of pixels per inch (or “dpi” dots per inch)   The higher the resolution (more dots per inch) the larger the file, AND the more detailed the file will be. 

Dimension:  size or the file saved by your phone or camera

Quality:  the amount of data compression or optimizing

 

Online / Email Pictures
If you’ve made it this far congratulation, because this post is putting ME to sleep…..

My rule of thumb is to keep pictures that will be emailed or posted online to between 72 and 180 dpi.  But this is not going to help if the pic is 3000 pixels (dot) wide.  You will scroll to see the right and bottom.  So the dimension I use is a relative width of between 500 and 600.

Examples:  ?

picture at 180dpi – dimension 750 x  563  (158 kb)

pic 500 x 375  at 180 dpi  (86 kb)

 

If you need the detail above but want the picture to fit crop out the portion you need  to 500 x 375 and leave the resolution at 180 dpi.  (96 kb)

finally 500 x 375  at 72 dpi (86 kb)

 

I have Adobe PhotoShop that I use to edit my pictures, but it really is overkill for most people.  With this application I can define the image size by changing the resolution and/or dimensions to create these test.  

Simply resizing a pic by a percentage, is very confusing especially if you don’t know what the settings are to begin with.  But there are a lot of free or shareware application out there that can do simple editing . 

Here is a site I recently found to resize pictures for free.   FREE is good!!!

http://www.picresize.com/