building block dress book tour: don’t call me betsy

Hello there, and happy Wednesday! Let me introduce you to Elizabeth from Don’t Call Me Betsy. She is a quilter who is joining the Building Block Dress book tour today. Be sure to visit Elizabeth on Craftsy where she has a couple of classes called Start Free-Motion Quilting and Start Foundation Paper Piecing.

For the book tour she sewed up a cute little tunic for her baby daughter, read more over on her blog.

Elizabeth: Blog, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook

Hi there, I’m Elizabeth, and I’m a mom of two great kids – one boy, who’s 8 going on 30, and one little girl, who’s a whirling dervish of energy these days. She’s nine months old and absolutely everywhere. When it comes to sewing, I’m primarily a quilter; two-dimensional sewing is my jam. That kind of sewing makes sense to me. Garments scare me a bit. Sleeves, hemlines, all those 3-D things freak me out! But while my daughter is little, it’s a good time for me to start trying to tackle my garment fears, because she’s small and it doesn’t take much fabric, or time really, to sew through a simple dress for her. One day, I’ll try and sew something for myself, but in the meantime, I’m enjoying working through a few things here and there for her. Besides, she makes the cutest model!

Hands down my biggest sewing successes have been publishing my patterns in books – it’s an amazing feeling to see your name in print and to see people make the patterns you write. I think my biggest sewing fail was likely the time that I inadvertently free-motion quilted my son’s Christmas wishlist to the back of a quilt, because it just happened to be on my sewing table one day when I was working on quilting a large quilt. I usually wear headphones while I free-motion, so I had noticed a bit of unusual friction while free-motioning, but because it was intermittent and didn’t affect my thread, I didn’t think much of it, until I was finished quilting, and flipped the quilt over and saw the list attached to the back of the quilt. And then laughed. And laughed. Until I had to start picking the list out of the back of the quilt. So far I haven’t had any real garment fails, mostly because I haven’t been doing it long enough yet, but I’m sure there are many to come!

I’ve got quite a few favorite fabric stores both in-person and online, but these days when it comes to fabrics for garments, one of my go-to haunts is an online shop called Imagine Gnats, which carries a great assortment of garment fabrics and great explanations of what the different kinds are, how they’re best used and so on.

Go and have a look at some of the first creations tagged with #buildingblockdress over on Instagram.