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: bags

sunglasses pouch

Our guild is doing a swap today–everyone participating is bringing a sunglasses pouch.  As usual, I had about 800 ideas and then when I actually made the item I dumped all of my ideas and made this instead.  🙂 I love it and want to make another one for me (and I’m planning on sticking […]

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portabello pixie gathered market bag

When I proudly showed Nic my birdie sling, his only comment was “that’s really big,” so I changed my mother’s day gift plan for my momma from the birdie sling to the smaller Portabello Pixie gathered market bag pattern that I unearthed last month. After making it, though, in the future I’d construct it more […]

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more jane market bags

It was a market bag weekend (using jane market bag pattern)–I made my library bag as well as two others. I find that whenever I repeat a pattern, I end up making more mistakes than the first time.  With the floral bag and my library bag I forgot to do the top stitching down the […]

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the joy of quilting

I love to sew.  I’m so grateful to modern quilting for making it more accessible, more fun, more relaxed.  I love that we have so much choice–machine or hand, complex or simple, scrappy or coordinated, solids or prints, modern or reproduction, bright or subdued.  I love that for every taste there is a pattern.  For […]

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birdie sling

One of my favorite fabric lines this year is Spring Street.  It makes me happy and fits the season so well.  I did a pattern swap with a friend from my guild, and I got to make some Birdie Sling bags from her pattern and she got to play with my Practical Bag pattern!  With […]

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another wallet

I made a bunch of these cash and carry wallets before Christmas and found them to be a fun quick project.  I think my confidence level was too high because when I made this one for our trip (I don’t want to carry around my big heavy normal wallet all day), it turned out to […]

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