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

sewing kit

Inspired by Jessica‘s fantastic sewing kit for her diamonds quilts, I put together a similar kit for my diamonds quilt as well as the hand quilting I’m doing (and it’s all ready to go for bindings, too).  So far it’s so handy I can’t believe I ever lived without it.  Here’s a peek: All this […]

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central park quilt

I finished sewing the binding on this monstrosity over a week ago, but it took me forever to get pictures because (1) it’s really hard to get decent pictures of a quilt this big and (2) I’m disappointed in the quilting.  I couldn’t figure out why some sections of the quilt seem to pull in […]

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blast from the past – my first quilt

This quilt is going on 15 years of UFO-ness.  It’s the first quilt I ever worked on, though I’ll probably have made 50 by the time I get this one finished.  It’s a sample quilt that I started at the tender age of 13.  I was hand quilting it at the stroke of midnight 2000.  […]

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finished: spring quilt – dream on charm pack

Remember this dream on quilt top?  When I finished it at the end of October, autumn was coming on strong and I decided to set it aside until working with the spring colors felt right again.  The design is based off a quilt that I saw on flickr (which of course I can’t find the […]

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finished: mardi gras quilt

Remember the quilt back that went from pretty stack of fabric to hideous “I-can’t-possibly-use-this?”  Well, it wasn’t really the fabric’s fault.  The strips looked fine, they just didn’t look okay with the print I was using.  I realized that the section I had pieced didn’t need to be a total loss, though–that it just needed […]

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