Bring on the Christmas Projects!

I'm sitting here, catching up on electronic correspondance as the first snow of the season flies, wishing all of you a Happy and Healthy Thanksgiving.  This is a quiet holiday here, and I am working on putting some finishing touches on the quilt below...it's a flimsy which has had way way too many birthdays. It's ultimately going to become the Christmas quilt for the studio.  In it's current version, it's a bit too small for it's ultimate space, and I learned a trick while I was in the Mistyfuse booth at Festival  that I want to share with you.I'm adding another border to the quilt as shown,  equal in width to the rows with the flying geese and the HSTs - an in those borders, I'm going to show the words "Love", "Joy", "Family" and "Celebrate" going around the Perimeter. Mistyfuse is going to allow me to do that.The first step is printing with Word to find the font that you want to use, and scaling it to fit. It's a little trial and error, but I settled on Garamond at 240 as the best size for the project.  I printed out "Love" and "Joy" on a sheet of paper - I'll go back and catch the other two in a bit.Using Bakers parchment paper from the kitchen, I traced the words as printed onto the parchment paper using a white prismacolor pencil that I bought at the local craft store for less than $2.  I used the white pencil because the fabric I'm using is dark - if you used a light fabric, a no 2 pencil works great.In the photo to the left, I've traced the word "Love" onto the parchment - but using a white pencil, it doesn't exactly show up. If you place the tracing with the pencil side down onto a piece of pre-fused fabric (fusible side up) and apply the iron, you'll be able to transfer the pencil marking to the fabric directly.  In the photo at left, you can make out the word "Love" printed in reverse - but when you cut out the word and place it on the border print, this is what you'll see... I cut the letters out individually, and placed them against the background fabric to see how it looks.   I'm pleased with what I saw, and happy to share this with you. If you're working on a project and need a quick way to add some lettering to it - say, in a Christmas stocking - this gives you a lot of possibilities.I'll be playing with this some more, I promise!