Sylvia Schaefer's Blog

The copies of Modern Scrap Quilts are on their way from the warehouse, so if you preordered your copy, it will be heading out to you soon!

I’ve shared some sneak peeks, but here are all the projects in the book! Copies are available here.

If you’d like chances to win an e-book version of the book, hop on over to the blog tour going on now for a new chance to win at every stop!

Over the years, I have collected quite a lot of ribbons from various quilt shows. I used to hang them all on the door to my studio space, but since moving downstairs into our finished basement, I no longer have a door and the ribbons had been languishing in a bin.

I'm rather proud of a few of these, so I really wanted to be able to enjoy them. After thinking about it for a while, and several failed solutions involving comman...

I'm so excited to be teaching at QuiltCon again next year! I know I'm a bit late as registration opens next week, but if you're still on the fence, here are my classes and lecture happening next year!

This lecture is all about ways to incorporate scraps into the negative space of modern quilts. If you've ever been intimidated by vast expanses of solids in modern quilts, or you just want t...

I am so excited to share that I have a new book coming out later this year! Modern Scrap Quilts will be out with Stash Publications in November!

This book was originally supposed to be mostly a pattern book, but I realized I had a lot to say about scraps in the negative space, so it has ended up being a bit of a follow-up to my first book, The Quilter’s Negative Space Handbook. That means that in addition to the patterns, there are lots of ideas to help you design your own quilts—and help...

My local guild held their biannual quilt show a few months ago, and I’m only now getting a chance to go through my photos and do a little photo dump of my favorite quilts from the show!

The show has a modern category, although there were plenty of cool quilts, and quilts I’d consider modern, in other categories. This one may have been one of my very favorites:

I loved this Cathedral Windows quilt—a block I have no...

Now that she has received it (several months late), I can finally post pictures of the wedding quilt I made for a dear friend from college!

Obviously, I wanted to make her a double wedding ring quilt! I haven’t seen her in a while, but she told me that her home was decorated in reds and blacks/grays, so I settled on black rings with red inside the melon shapes and a white background.

In order to make things go a little more quickly, I decided not to piece the arcs, and just ...

It wouldn’t be a new quilting studio without a new cutting table, right? In my old space I propped up a table with some PVC pipe to get it to the right height, but I wanted a table on casters with storage underneath—so enter the IKEA Kallax cutting table hack!

I used two 8-cube Kallax units, which I bolted to a sheet of plywood. I added casters (plus feet, to give some additional height since I am 5’10”), and the tabletop from my old cutting table on top, which was just barely big enough. I woul...

We recently finished our basement to create a studio space for me, along with some storage space and a play space for the kiddos. It has been a slow process, but I am getting organized down there, and one of the things I worked on over this past winter was putting up a proper design wall. I haven’t had a design wall in over ten years—I typically design my quilts on the computer, and since many if not most of them recently have used solids, putting up and moving around my blocks hasn’t really bee...

I’ve been wanting to do another paper pieced bird for a while, and this spring I finally sat down to work out a paper pieced bluebird. I figured everyone likes bluebirds—they’re bright and cheerful, and they have a reputation for being “family-oriented,” with early clutches sometimes staying around to help raise babies from later in the season.

But after I finished the bluebird, I started thinking about the fact that, of course, this is mostly a bird found in the eastern United States, and thos...

You have probably noticed that temperature quilts are all the rage right now—there’s even a special exhibit of them planned for QuiltCon in Phoenix next month. Basically, for one year, you make a block every day that denotes the high and low temperatures of the day using a color gradient. Over the course of a year, you end up with a neat color gradation.

I think many of these quilts are absolutely stunning in their visual impact, but the science side of me doesn’t feel like they convey a whol...