Week 3 Giveaway Winner

The winner of the thrid giveaway is Margaret. I can't mention Margaret without telling you all to head over to her blog to check out her beautiful quilting. (Her piecing is pretty spectacular, too, and I'm lucky enough to have one of her creations on my own wall.)

Now, a few more answers:

Penny asked what is my favourite machine quilting book?The truth is, I don't really have one! I have a few books which I use for inspiration on occasion, but none I regularly use. I love Karen McTavish's books, but even so, I don't use them often. There are a few books which I'd like to get, such as Anita Shackelford's Infinite Feathers, Kim Brunner's Twirly Whirly Feathers and Linda Taylor's Fancy Feathers books (notice a theme there?!). I'm totally self-taught, though hoping to take some classes at AMQF here in Adelaide in October. I get a lot of inspiration from the many magazines I read, especially Machine Quilting Unlimited. Blogs and Flickr and online sources are really useful as well.

Shelley asked if I'm wanting more children? We'd always planned to have two children, and are happy to keep it that way. I went through a brief stage of wanting another baby, but honestly, two is enough for me.

Margarita asked "How many kilometres of quilting is there in one of your quilts? " This is another "I don't know" My focus on the quilting stage is relatively recent, and a lot of my older quilts are quite simply quilted. The two quilts which I'd guess have the most quilting (certainly for their size) are lap-size and quilted very heavily all over. Fancy Feathers has about 1100m and I imagine Starburst would have a similar amount. I'm not good at either keeping track of or estimating thread use, and in most cases I use several different threads, which makes it hard. Does anyone know a good way of tracking it?

Margaret is curious how much I'd charge to do a beachy quilt commission? Well, I have a small lap-size one available on Etsy for $450US - which is a bargain given the time involved, but not a cheap item! Pricing quilts is my least favourite part of selling them, and something I feel very uncomfortable doing. I suspect I'm not alone in that!

Karen asks how many hours a week I spend sewing/quilting? This is only an estimate, but I'm in the study from around 9pm-2am each night, plus a few hours on Saturdays and Sundays, and the odd hour here and there. Probably 2/3 of that time is spent actively sewing or working on designs, so that's about 25 hours a week working on quilts in some way or other.

Another reader asked where I got the name for my blog. It's explained here in my first ever post. Sampaguita is the national flower of the Philippines, where I lived with my family  between 1988 and 1991. The flowers in my blog header and the giveaway button are sampaguitas.

More answers another time.

See you again tomorrow for giveaway number 4!