Under-the-wire Finish for the #intrepidthreadchallenge

Last fall, Julie at the Intrepid Thread created a challenge based on using fabrics of her choosing. She has a great way with putting fabrics together and so I knew I wanted to play.

Here are the fabrics.

I love text on fabrics and scrappy backgrounds and knew that I would use those mini-charms in whatever I made.

After I saw the fabric, I had lots of ideas ... a few that played ping pong in my head for far too long.

Ultimately I decided to chase down something else that has long ping-pinged in my head: the traditional block whose name is on the tip of my mind whenever I see a modern Swoon block.

I flipped through Brackman's Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns and decided Rolling Star, published by The Rural New Yorker on 6/4/1932 looked to be an ancestor to Camille Roskelley's Swoon.

So I started here, and resized it to work with the mini-charms, added a seam that I thought would make construction easier and set to work.

I used a combination of shapes cute from templates and rotary cut squares and half-square triangles.

I started by putting together the center, then assembled the chunks that would surround it.

I expected the Y-seams in the star in the center ... but was a little surprised when I realized that there would be a lot more Y-seams when it came time to put all my chunks together.

But, as the saying goes, all's well that end's well ... and here's my finished pillow. 

The finished pillow measures 12 by 16 inches.

The front is simply quilted with loopy feathers, wobbly matchsticks and doodle-y daisies and loops.

The back is made from the rest of the pink fabric, along with a coordinating fabric from my stash, in a simple lapped construction.

Although it was made as a pillow cover, it may end up serving as a table mat at my house.

Thanks, Julie, for the interesting challenge.

Not only was it fun for me–once I finally decided what I wanted to make–I have really enjoyed seeing everyone's creative projects on the Intrepid Thread Challenge Link Up Party.

Plan B - My pillow for March FMQ Challenge

Em, of Em's Scrapbag, calls it a Plan B when you use blocks made for a different purpose in a new project.  I like that.   Here's my Plan B pillow, made for the March FMQ challenge.

And here's how it started.

After a demo and presentation of improvisational piecing at the Modern Mini-group, I wanted to try something more abstract than my usual.

At the time I had just finished Jenny's Welcome Spring stitchery design and thought I could improvise some borders, so I gathered some fabric scraps that would coordinate.

After playing around a bit, I had created a border that I thought looked interesting on it's own but ... absolutely horrible next to the stitchery.

I considered (and dismissed) a few ideas for using the improvised strip with the stitchery.

   

And then, Plan B was born.

I put a simple print border around Welcome Spring and combined my improvised border with another fabric and use it was the background for the March FMQ challenge.

I chose option #1:

Use the free FMQ tutorial provided by Patsy, from the 2012 FMQ Challenge, to create a FMQ Pillow adapting her border approach to your pillow design.  To clarify, you get to decide the number size of your pillow, the number of borders you wish to use, as well as which of the designs Patsy shared in this free tutorial, as you feel appropriate.

It was suggested that we sketch out our plan and practice first, but since this was my Plan B (and dangerously close to the end of the month), I just went for it.  Here are photos (front and back) of the quilting, before it was assembled into a pillow.

A Cozy Finish

I made a pair of cozy flannel pillow covers this week.

The quilting was inspired by that I used on the flannel zig-zag quilt last month and QuiltShopGal's 2015 FMQ challenge for February.

For the challenge, I chose Option #1 which was to use Leah Day's quilting design Rail Road Tracks.

It's a little difficult to see on the plaid on the front, so here's a photo of one of the areas filled with the required quilting design from the back. It is probably not a design I would choose to use, but the challenge pushed me to do it anyway.  (It's always a good thing to try something new.)



Each of the pillows is 24 inches square. They were pieced from flannel scraps from my stash.

The backs are plain (unquilted) flannel.

The edges are finished with a quarter-inch binding made from more flannel.

Here are photos of the quilted piece, front and back, before it was sewn into a pillow.

In addition to the February FMQ Challenge, I am joining the list for Richard and Tanya 's Link-A-Friday Finish. 

April's Lovely Finish- a Spring Challenge Pillow

Here's what I made from those made fabrics that I shared a couple weeks ago.  It's my Lovely Finish for April.

This 14 inch pillow is also my response to the Spring Challenge for the 15 Minutes of Play blog.  The requirements of the challenge were to begin with the sketch below and change one thing about it and to use some made fabric.

Because the line drawing was so similar to the Modern Clover block that Kate designed and I created the block pattern for the April 2011 Block Lotto, I initially thought to use that block because it would fulfill the requirement of changing one thing.

You can see the beautiful quilt Kate made from the lotto blocks she won that month in the Block Lotto Gallery on this page: Modern Clovers - A Finished Quilt.

Then I started asking myself those what if? questions and pulled out a compass to turn all the straight lines in Victoria's drawing to curves: A circle instead of a square for the bloom, a curvy stem and symmetrical leaves with pointy ends.  (You might have to squint or enlarge the image to see my penciled design).

I had become a fan of Dale Fleming's technique for sewing inset circles when I tried it for the first time a couple months ago to make the February Bead-on-a-String blocks for the block lotto, that I thought of it as a way to sew this block ... but I wondered if it would work when the fabrics involved were made fabrics and had lots of layers and seams in them. I also had never inset anything with points, like the leaf shapes.

If you google Dale Fleming 6-minute circle, you'll find links to Dale demonstrating her technique on Simply Quilts (on the HGTV website) and a longer version (with other shapes and examples on The Quilt Show (membership may be required).  You'll also find others sharing their experience–clearly I am not the only one who has become a fan.

You can see in my sketch, and in the finished pillow, that the circle bloom overlaps the leaves. I decided that the bloom would be "in front" of the leaves and so, I would need to inset the leaves, then inset the circle into the piece.  I created two templates (from freezer paper) and made them 14 1/2 inches square, the same size as large as the background, to help me keep the individual elements aligned.

Here are the in-progress photos I took of the process.

The individual photos (and more) are in my Flickr album: Spring 2014 Challenge.  You can also flip through them using the arrows on the photo at the bottom of this post.

I wasn't sure that my sewing machine was going to like sewing through the many layers of made fabric and the glue that holds everything together, especially at the bottom of the circle, where I was sewing the circle into the leaf/background seams.

It worked beautifully, the first time, with no ripping or re-sewing. I was amazed.

The last photo in the mosaic above shows the wrong side and how it all somehow worked.  

I added the curvy stem by hand appliqué of a bias strip, sewn into a 1/2 inch tube.

Since I wasn't entirely happy with the center of my string-pieced circle, I also added three circles by hand appliqué using a US dime as my template to cut and prepare the circles.

Since I knew it was going to become a pillow, I used a plain muslin fabric for the back ... which makes it easy to see the good, bad and the ugliness of my quickie free motion quilting.

I outlined the pieced and appliquéd shapes, quilted the background with a free motion fill design–similar to Leah Day's Bed of Roses, though mine actually feel more like fried egg flowers with spiral centers–and added veins to the leaf shapes. There's an extra layer of batting behind the circle bloom.

After it was quilted, I turned it into a pillow by added a plain fabric lapped back and binding the edges.

And then,  after a weekend of gray rainy days, it was ready for it's day in the morning sun.

In my case, April Showers bring progress to quilting projects :-)

Sometimes a little play and a small challenge piece can spark a new idea ... and this experience was no different ... I can't wait to see if my new idea works.

I'll be linking to the Finishes party for A Lovely Finish when it's published later this month.  This is also a NewFO finish for me in April.   If only the rest of my life was going so well and ahead of schedule ...