I’ve had a lot of questions today about the hoop sizes needed to stitch out the GO! Be Dazzled Block of the Month designs. Here’s the scoop!

If you have a Bernina Jumbo Hoop for the 830 you are in excellent shape. The central diamond blocks will each stitch out in one hooping and the square blocks will each stitch out in two hoopings.

If you have a Mega Hoop (150mm x 400mm) or equivalent (Pfaff and Viking both have hoops that are 200mm x 360mm) you are also in great shape. The central diamond blocks will each stitch out in one hooping and the square blocks will each stitch out in 3 or 4 hoopings.

If you have a Large Oval Hoop (145mm x 255mm) or equivalent then you are in good shape – as long as you have a lot of patience. The central diamond blocks will each require two or three hoopings while some of the square blocks will require up to 9 hoopings.

Placement is super easy, with detailed instructions on the CD for how to mark the fabric for each block and align these marks with placement lines that should be stitched out directly onto the stabilizer in the hoop. Be sure to read the instructions before you start stitching!

Placement of applique shapes is also super easy! Once your background fabric has been put in place in the hoop, the next thing to stitch out is placement lines for each applique shape. Remove the hoop from your embroidery module while you fuse the prepared applique shapes in place. Some of the designs have layered appliques, so you will need to do 2 or 3 sets of placement lines each followed by fusing shapes in place.

Another question that came in today was about the thread colors used. Here’s the scoop on that!

Isacord thread was used for GO! Be Dazzled, in the following colors:

• 0811 Candlelight
• 2508 Hot Pink
• 2715 Pansy
• 4620 Jade
• 1010 Toast
• 2506 Cerise
• 2810 Orchid
• 4423 Marine Aqua
• 2550 Soft Pink
• 2510 Roseate
• 2830 Wild Iris
• 6011 Tamarack

If you want to do your own colors, here’s a formula I have been using with the students in my Block of the Month classes:

Choose 3 different fabrics – in the case of GO! Be Dazzled there are Regal Purple, Cerise and Daffodil from the Crystals collection by Benartex. For GO! Be Dazzled Too the fabrics used are Hunter, Sage and Cream from the Crystals collection by Benartex.

Now choose 2 or 3 threads to match each of the 3 fabrics, e.g. 2 or 3 different shades of yellow to match the Daffodil. This will give you 6-9 thread colors.

Now choose 2 or 3 threads that contrast with the fabrics. For GO! Be Dazzled, these were two shades of turquoise, and a bright lime green. If your 3 fabrics are different shades of the same color, then choose 2 or 3 threads of the complementary color. Check your color wheel if in doubt!

Hope this helps to answer some of the questions you may have. More coming on GO! Be Dazzled in the months to come. Feel free to drop me a line if you have more questions.

After a very hectic couple of months, I am sitting in my hotel room in Minneapolis after my first day at International Quilt Market.

Three weeks ago today I moved into a new home – twice as much space, with a dedicated studio which has really opened up the flow. Still a few boxes left to unpack and lots of sorting still to be done, plenty of room to dance, and I could even lay a king size quilt out on the floor – if I really wanted to!

The project that has taken up most of my time in recent weeks is my new design collection – GO! Be Dazzled – which was introduced to the world at large today in my School House at Quilt Market.

Do you recognize the GO! logo used on the cover? GO! as in AccuQuilt GO! the fabric cutter.

This quilt was created as a Block of the Month to specifically use the dies for the AccuQuilt GO! Each month 2 blocks are created – they can be identical or use diferent fabrics and/or thread colors.

Each month one or more of the following dies is used:

• GO! Circle 2″, 3″, 5″
• GO! Stars 2″, 3″, 4″
• GO! Hearts 2″, 3″, 4″
• GO! Funky Flower
• GO! Round Flower
• GO! Feathers

The title of my School House was:

Embroidered Applique Meets AccuQuilt GO!

Subtitle: A Match Made in Heaven.

It really is a match made in heaven! The biggest challenge that most people have with any applique project is creating the applique shapes. Using the GO! cutter and dies ALL of the challenges go away. No printing of templates, no tracing temlplates and no cutting on the line with a pair of scissors. Simply apply fusible webbing to your applique fabric, place the fabric on the die and crank the handle. Finished in seconds!

I’m pretty excited about my new collection – and I hope you will be too!

Here are some close-ups of the embroidery.

It’s pretty exciting when you make a quilt that people love - especially when there is not just one, but two kits available so that other people can make their own version of the quilt!

My Silk Hearts Quilt is such a quilt. I am very happy to announce the introduction of the Silk Hearts Collection – 16 fat quarters of silk dupioni, and 12 large spools of AURIfil Cotton Mako 50 wt – which provide everything you need to be able to create your own Silk Hearts Quilt, using the designs from my Hearts CD.

The Silk Hearts Quilt started out looking pretty plain when it was just blocks sitting on my design wall.

Then I added the hearts to get an idea  how it was going to look:

Then there was a lot embroidery, followed by a lot of quilting:

The quilt was finished with a piped facing – for no other reason than I did not have enough silk to put a traditional binding on! But I love the look – more about how to do it in another post.

Coming soon… detailed cutting intructions for the Silk Hearts Quilt.

The Hearts Quilt Pattern is finally available!

Go to http://sarahvedelerdesigns.com/hearts-quilt-pattern/ to download your free copy now!

This summer has been my time to fall in love with silk! It has also been my time to fall in love with using cotton thread for embroidered applique, specifically Aurifil Cotton Mako. This is not a “normal” choice for embroidery, so up until now, there has not been a thread chart available for it in the Bernina Embroidery Software. Now there is!

To download the new thread chart for Aurifil Cotton Mako, please enter your name and email address here:

You will receive an email with a link to the download page for the file, along with instructions on where to put it.

Thanks to Alex Veronelli from Aurifil for helping to create this thread chart!

Samples of Embroidered Applique using Aurifil Cotton Mako

Monday August 31, 2009 at 7:40am saw me sitting on  a plane leaving  Phoenix, AZ and flying to Cleveland, OH. Why? To tape a 10 minute segment for Quilting Arts TV!

The last few weeks have been spent preparing for this major life event. I’ve never been on TV before, and despite watching shows from the previous series, I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting myself into!

My brief – to demonstrate how to do embroidered applique. The best bit – I got to do it on one of the new Bernina 830 embroidery machines using the ever so large Jumbo hoop.

My plane landed at Cleveland Hopkins airport on time at about 20 minutes past 2pm. Down to the baggage claim to see my suitcase full of quilts sitting waiting for me. What a relief!

Since it hadn’t occurred to me until about 9pm on Sunday that I would need to find a way to get myself from the airport to the studio, and the shuttle was fully booked, I found myself taking a taxi – which turned out to be cheaper!

4pm found me arriving at the Beachwood Studio, met at the front door by Katherine Lamancusa, assistant to the producer and person to turn to if you needed just about anything. Then into the Green Room – which really is very green!

Close to the end of the day, everyone there had already done their thing, so the atmosphere was cheerful and relaxed. Jeanie Sumrall-Ajero was a familiar face, and also rushing out the door so not much time to do anything other than say “Hi! Bye!”. It did mean that she freed up a table, so I got to empty all my stuff out and start to get organized. That’s my green suitcase in the center of the pic, with my table in the back right hand corner.

Jeanne Delpit from Bernina USA was also a familiar face and voice, and had a friendly hug to welcome me. Getting busy turned out to be a really good thing, so after unpacking I turned my attention to preparing fabric for the project I was going to demo on TV.

I had decided to use the designs from my newest embroidered applique collection, the Hearts CD, stitched out on Silk Dupioni with Aurifil Cotton Mako 50 weight thread.

I hadn’t decided what colors I was going to use, but finally chose  turquoise silk for the background, pink silk for the heart, with lime green, turquoise, orange and magenta for the thread.

Everything was finally cut, stabilized and ready! Time to stitch out a complete heart so that it would be “finished” and waiting in the jumbo hoop, for the end of my demonstration.

Pokey Bolton, the host of Quilting Arts TV was finally done with her part of filming for the day, and was also busy in the Green Room, working on a project. And borrowing my rotary cutter!

Everything finally finished and ready, time to go to the hotel. Teri Harris Lucas was also there a day early, and she had a car, and she was staying in the same hotel! So off we went together, enjoying a quiet dinner together at PF Chang’s across the street from the hotel.

Tuesday morning at 8am saw me in makeup getting ready to go on TV! I was the first guest of the day, but Pokey had been hard at work already, taping all the intros and exits for the series. She wears a different outfit for each show, so it seemed like she was back in the Green room every few minutes for a change of clothes.

And then it was my turn!

First to get the Bernina 830 onto the set. Jeanne took the sewing machine, Katherine was in charge of the embroidery module. It really is a big machine – especially when you have to move it!

Have you ever noticed that the people who are usually behind the camera don’t like to have their photo taken? Ray was the camera guy filming to the right of the set – at least from my perspective of being on the set! Billy is the floor director, equally shy when it came to having his photo taken!

Jeanne set up the 830 while Katherine helped me to bring all of my “stuff” onto the set. Where to put everything was the big question of the moment! I’m very glad that I had way too much stuff to show off. A lot of it didn’t appear – but Kathie Stull, the producer, helped us to choose the things that would show off best.

I was surprised how dark the rest of the studio is, and also how quiet! I think there were two camera guys, Ray off to the right of the set, and another guy straight in front doing all the closeups – from above! Billy, the floor director, was off to the left with a monitor to show what was being filmed. I think there was someone lurking at the back of the room, but have no idea what they were doing. A sound guy appeared a couple of times – first to get me hooked up with a mic, and then after we started filming to adjust the sound so that I could be heard!

Pokey was wonderful – very cool, calm and collected! Always there with the perfect question to move the demo along. All in all, this was about the fastest 10 minutes I have ever experienced – apart from the eternity it took for the machine to stitch out the placement line for the heart. Was it enough to give people a good view of what I do? Time will tell! Given that I have a lot to say about how to do embroidered applique, I don’t think I’ve ever been so tongue-tied before. Maybe there will be a next time – in which case now I know what to do – and it wasn’t quite so scary after all!

The girls are back in school and loving it; the Calico Cutups in El Mirage had fun with Spirals and are looking forward to doing Feathers in early Fall; Nina McVeigh and Embroidery TnT were wonderful; and Bernina Embroidery Software v6 is packed with new features!

Jewels in Silk is now pieced and waiting to be quilted. Taking a sharp photo of the silk has been somewhat challenging, but I had some success while the quilt top was hanging at Sew from the Heart during Embroidery TnT on Wednesday.

It wasn’t until this afternoon that I got to work on quilting the batik Hearts quilt, and that only because my class at 35th Ave Sew and Vac was cancelled. After some in-the-ditch stitching to anchor the quilt (and get rid of most of the pins I used for basting) I started to do the background quilting around the actual hearts. I love the way the embroidered applique “pops” up when the background has been quilted. It really adds a stunning finishing touch to the embroidery.

So that’s what happened last week! Now for what’s in store this week.

Going to the gym and taking a daily vitamin supplement have been sadly neglected during the summer months and I’m beginning to feel the effects. Now that the girls are back in school, getting back into some sort of routine will be much easier. And when I take good care of myself, my quilting improves! So my aim for this week is to visit the gym at least 3 times, if not 4, and to start taking my vitamins again. Even if I have to come up with some sort of chart to remind myself to do it!!!

Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday are all teaching days. Digitizing for Beginners part 1 at Sew from the Heart on Wednesday. This group will get a sneak peak of v6 of the Bernina Embroidery Software, so I’m very excited about that and hope that they will be too. Quilted All Over part 1 (Spirals) at 3 Dudes Quilting on Thursday. This is always a fun class – I love to see the progress people make over the 3 sessions. No Hands Piped Binding also at 3 Dudes Quilting is on Sunday. Another fun class, especially when people finally get how the binding comes together.

That leaves Monday, Tuesday and Friday for quilting and Saturday for having fun with the girls. Can I finish quilting the Hearts quilt this week? Time will tell! Given that I’m flying to Cleveland on August 31 to tape a 10 minutes segment for Quilting Arts TV on September 1, and I’m demonstrating how to do Embroidered Applique using my Hearts designs, the quilt had better be finished by the end of this week! Tuesday is going to be a marathon embroidery day, assisted by my friend Pam. The theory behind this is that if 2 of us can do all the embroidery I need for Quilting Arts TV in 1 day, then the rest of the next 2 weeks can be spent finishing it all off – mainly quilting.