Needles and a Pen » Knitting, Sewing, and Nursing School

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  • Welcome to my blog!

    Hi! I'm Traci. I'm a Registered Nurse who loves quilting, knitting, cross stitch, and the great outdoors. In my pre-scrubs life, I owned Real Photography, and you can still see my old wedding and portrait photography site here .

    I've created a map that shows links to our camping/hiking/general family fun review posts that you can find here. It's pretty much the coolest thing on this site. Thanks, Google!

    I great big puffy heart *love* comments, so please let me know you visited! I try to always reply!

Category Archives: quilts

lucky find quilt

Hey look at that!  Exactly one day shy of a year since my last post and here I am again!  It’s been so long I couldn’t even remember the url to log in to write this post. Anyway, the last year has been devoid of blog posts but not of crafting.  Let’s start with this […]

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Quiltmania 2013

In the six weeks between Halloween and our departure for Germany for Christmas with family, I made three quilts.  Three.  It was insanity.  Insanity that was supposed to have been completed well before November, of course…but having to commit to things like a pattern and fabric in a quilt that was JUST RIGHT for each […]

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Children at Play Quilt: Finished!

When my mom came to visit in 2012 we started a strip quilt together with the girl fabrics from Sarah Jane’s Children at Play line (I’ve earned a reputation as making my guests work) and I had everything but the binding finished this past spring.  When my mom came to visit in October I realized […]

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checking in with my paper pieced diamonds

***Cool announcement:  the subscribe by email feature in the sidebar to the right is now working!*** Look at this poor little neglected blog!  It was a busy summer that included a week-long evacuation from a wildfire that we thought for a few days had destroyed our home (I even had a blog post planned out […]

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Chicopee Scrappy Trip

I kept the purple.  It actually was a good moment for me because I realized it really gets to the heart of my issues with the MQG right now (ridiculous judging forms from Quiltcon, the new limited definition of what constitutes Modern Quilting, among other issues).  As Kelly so perfectly put it–I can learn to […]

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save me from myself

I have officially joined the ranks of the crazy people.  I am actually giving serious thought to ripping off a quilt’s binding, making new continuous bias binding, and sewing it on again.  I think this might be unnecessary.  Help me decide. Here’s the deal–with this quilt I thought the purple binding was a no-brainer.  I […]

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