What to do with old quilt magazines?

Yesterday I went upstairs to sew the binding on Lily's quilt, but was stopped by the pile of old quilt magazines that I had pulled out last Thursday for the guild's silent auction. I decided not to haul any mags in for the auction, but did clear out about eight books that I never refer to. The mags were from 2000-2002. I went through all the Quilters' Newsletters and pulled out articles to keep, and actually filed them alphabetically in folders. I still have a pile a foot high to deal with.

Then, I decided to start a different project that I got excited about after watching her on The Quilt Show. I bought Vikki Pignatelli's book, Quilting by Improvisation, and have now created the freezer paper pattern for "My Star Dances." This project introduces her method of piecing with curves. I am excited to try it, because she does not use any glue stick or glue like other methods I have tried and don't like. I end up with glue all over my hands, table, tools, you name it! Vicki uses a lightweight stabilizer and freezer paper. Usually Vikki just irons down the fabric to the stabilizer, using the freezer paper pattern on top as a guide. She recommends using Stitch Witchery on the narrow roll when it is necessary to fix the seam allowance in place. We will see how successful I am with this method. The possiblilities for artistic quilting are endless if you can sew anything you can draw! In fact, I hope to take this book and go through it step by step to learn all her methods. One of my quilting groups has issued a challenge to make a leaf art quilt by our fall quarterly meeting. Maybe I will come up with something original by then!