Fun with Stencils

I'm still trying to finish up this small pinwheels quilt I started last year.

I hand quilted the center with diagonal lines and then stopped. I often get stumped by how to do the borders of my quilts. I recently became motivated to finish when Cindy from The Stencil Company e-mailed me to suggest a stencil giveaway here on the blog. Maybe this will help motivate some of you to finish up the quilting on your quilts as well. Quilting with stencils is so much fun and if you're making small quilts with me it's a pretty simple way to finish them. I have a nice variety and use the small stencils in some of my small blocks and also the border stencils at times when I get tired of straight-line stitching.

It seems that some of you like to hand quilt your small quilts just as much as I do because when I wrote about one stencil in particular that I liked to use for my borders, many of you contacted the company to buy the same stencil. Remember this quilt? And the simple Wave stencil I used in the borders? I blogged about it here . I will sometimes use the same stencil to quilt my sashings.

The Stencil Company and I are holding a Free Stencil Giveaway here on the blog every month. Is that cool or what?? About every month or so I will choose a stencil for you to use for  hand quilting your quilts and then demonstrate it on a quilt. All you have to do is post a message and I will choose 3 lucky winners every month.

 This month  - starting today - we will be giving away the Rick Rack stencil -

Look how cute it is!

And easy too. Use the stencil to mark the lines with your favorite tool - a washable fabric pen or a quilting pencil, whatever. Your choice. Then just quilt on the lines and erase or wash them out when you're done.  I'll try to show you what it looks like when I'm finished.

I used my new Sewline marking pencil with green lead.

And even if you don't win a stencil this time, you can still order them directly from the company. To make it easy for you to find the stencils I like to use for my small quilts, click here. (Look at that - they created a special page just for my Sentimental Quilter followers (you)). These are just some of the stencils that I think are fun to use to quilt your small quilts.

Wouldn't a quilt block look cute quilted with this one??

To win your free stencil, go ahead and finish this sentence: "When I'm not quilting, I am . . . ."  Post a nice creative message and we'll see what happens. And remember to keep it clean, please. Some of us are old ladies . . . .

I'll choose a winner sometime next week. Remember to give me your name and a link to your e-mail or blog so I can notify you. This is important. I get upset when some of you ask me a question and then do not leave me an e-mail address so I can respond. There will be another stencil giveaway next month too so keep checking back to see which one is next and if I can keep up with all the hand quilting. I'm telling you, quilting with stencils is going to be so much fun!