Textured pillow for L

Happy Friday! My most recent finish is this little pillow that I made as a gift for a friend. It is about 12"x18".

Each of the six blocks is a different textured design: pleats, ruffles and tucks in purple and turquoise. I used this free tutorial from Teresa Down Under. The specific blocks are:

• 3. Double controlled pleats
• 5. Centered tucks with bow ties
• 6. Gathered strip
• 8. Undulating tucks
• 17. Pleated peakaboo
• 18. Gathered double edge ruffles

I also tried to make #4, "Double controlled pleats with ripple," but it turned out more like "Outta control pleats with cursing." That block is currently in timeout in my crumb bin. That'll teach it!

The quilting is stitch in the ditch around each block with a few extra stitches to hold down some of the more adventurous pleats. I also added prairie points (or as DH calls them, Stegasaurus points) to the outer edge. My first prairies! They're kinda fun. The backing is a simple envelope enclosure in a tonal black.

My friend has Parkinson's disease, and I made this as a sort of "fidget pillow" for her. Fidget pillows and quilts give a person with dementia something to do with their hands. Many of them have zippers and buttons and such. I thought all the different textures would be interesting to touch. Plus, she lives far away and I miss her! So I hope this makes her happy and reminds her of me from time to time.

Scrap, scrap, scrappin' along

After finishing up several gift quilts lately, I decided to just play in my scraps for a while. My blue/aqua box of scrap strips was overflowing, so that was a good place to start. I was inspired by a couple quilts I saw on Pinterest to make some 60 degree string triangles.

I raided my "light neutrals" scrap box, too, and made strip sets going from light to dark. Each set is about 9" wide and about 40-45". I had a few single pieces that were WOF, but most of the strips were pieced end to end in similar color and value as you can see. 

I read somewhere that your strip piecing will stay much straighter if you press the seams open instead of to one side. That was definitely true with these random, leftover scrap strips. Here's two sewn together. Note that big bow in the piecing.

After setting the seam then pressing it open, the bow completely disappeared. Magic, huh? Please excuse my well-used and rather scorched ironing board cover. I love that bird print, but it needs to be retired soon. 

After making the strip sets, I trimmed them all to 8.5" width and started cutting triangles. 8.5" is the maximum size I can cut with this ruler. I'm lazy, and wanted to cut and piece as few triangles as possible. Because the sets ended up all chopped up, having pieced strips was no big deal. You can see in this photo that half the triangles have a dark base, and half have a light base. I also ended up with those right angle triangle end pieces, which I saved.

I tried to keep the true blues and the aquas in separate strip sets, and ended up with four distinct sets of triangles. Completely by accident, the aqua strips had less white/cream, so they read as more uniformly colored than the true blues and the true blues have a more distinct pattern of light and dark.

I wanted to sash between each of the four sections and decided to go bold. GOLD bold! I've admired a number of scrappy quilts lately that have very patterned, brightly colored backgrounds. I pulled out an oddball dark yellow/gold with a red and blue paisley motif, and it spoke to me. It whispered, "Yo, Louise, it's a completely scrappy quilt! That's like completely free fabric right there, so try something new, why doncha? Who cares that might look like a circus tent when you're done? Don't be such a wuss. What have you got to lose?" Not exactly reassuring words, but when the fabric speaks, you gotta listen.

Here is that gold at the end of two rows, filling in the space at the end of the triangles. I only had a yard of it, so my sashing and borders needed to be skinny minnie to make it work. 

And here's the finished flimsy. The gold is kinda weird, but a good weird, I think. The triangles have a nice 3-D effect. There are lot of fun bits of fabric in there: cats, butterflies, hearts, birds and fish to name a few. It's pretty big for me, about 60"x70", which makes a nice couch or lap quilt size. Still, a bit more width in the sashing would have been nice.

Have you ever used a really off the wall fabric for background or sashing? Did you hem and haw about it first, or dive right in? Did it whisper to you, and if so, did it have a New Jersey accent? Weird.

Finishes galore

It's a gloomy, overcast day here in our New Orleans boatyard digs. However, the wind isn't blowing so I was able to pin up my latest quilty projects for some photos. From left to right: Gulf Coast Churn Dash after washing and drying; Hobe Horses; an as yet to be named chicken-themed flimsy; Winter Magic; and 3-D Play Mat.

Hobe Horses is my Hands2Help quilt for Camp Hobe, a charity sponsored by StashBox. Camp Hobe is for kids with cancer and their siblings, a place with all the fun and activities of summer camp that also provides necessary medical support. While the H2H challenge is over, Sarah let us know that quilts sent in after the deadline are still welcome!

This horse-themed quilt is simple patchwork with sashing and cornerstones to let the big focal pieces take center stage. It took me a while to accumulate enough horse fabric to make an entire quilt. Apparently, horses are fairly difficult to draw, because there is a LOT of really ugly, anatomically incorrect horse flesh out there in the fabric world.

I quilted Hobe Horses in simple, horizontal wavy lines, like wind through the horses manes. The backing is an odd olive green leaf print that actually works well with the browns and greens on the front. I hope an equine-crazy kid enjoys all the different horsey goodness on the front.

Next up is this finished quilt top featuring chicken fabrics. I really liked how the hourglass blocks in Gulf Coast Churn Dash set off the chunky churns, so I decided to do some more experimenting. This time, I used three color hourglasses to outline small square focal pieces cut from a panel.

Each panel square features a different chicken inside a wood frame, surrounded by black. The chickens have funny names ("Remedios"?) and light blue backgrounds. Half of the panel blocks end up surrounded by the yellow parts of the hourglasses. The yellow has little chicks hatching out of eggs.

The rest of the big chickens ("Blakey"? Who names a chicken "Blakey"?) are surrounded by red fabric with tiny drumsticks. Is this fate? Is Blakey destined to end up at KFC?

Winter Magic is made from another panel, and features dogs and snowmen. It isn't specifically a Christmas panel, although one of the dogs seems to be wearing reindeer antlers. The flags say, "Wishing you the blessings of magic on this crisp winter day!" "Make every day a parade!" and "Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!" The panel was only 24" wide, so I added side pieces to bring the whole thing to about 36" x 42", a good size baby or toddler quilt.

The backing is this snowflake patterned fine-wale corduroy, which makes it fairly heavy and warm. I decided that putting a layer of batting in would make the whole thing a bit TOO thick and warm, so I used a layer of flannel instead. It is finished pillowcase style with no binding.

To keep it soft and drapey, I did minimal quilting. The printed panel has a thin line of black around the characters, and that sort of looked like stitching to me. So I echoed around that line with white thread so the whimsical scenes would poof out a bit. I also outlined the swirling snow border to keep the little quilt lightly but evenly quilted. I did have grand plans to do lots of FMQ swirling motifs, but after I stitched up an area about 5"x 5", it was clear that the whole quilt would be much too stiff that way, so rip rip rip, out it came. 

3-D Play Mat is a scrappy experiment that started when the Covered in Love block drive featured a pleated, textured block. I had so much fun making that block that I went looking for other three dimensional tutorials. That led me to Teresa Down Under's Sewn Up blog and her series of textured 4-patches.

Someone wise suggested using coordinating colors when sewing up sample blocks, so I chose cream, turquoise, red and pink fabrics.

 

The first block I made riffed on Kat's pleated block, which she called Grandad's Shirts. This isn't the same block, but used the same pleat technique.

After that, I dove into Teresa's blocks. I tried Prairie Point Pinwheels,

Origami pinwheel (which is quite thick), 

and several bias edge manipulation blocks including this fussy cut bird and several flying geese. Teresa's tutorials also include a large number of smocking, ruffles and elaborate pin tucks that looked really hard. But now that I've finished this little sampler, I think I might try my hand at one or two of them.

The blocks are sashed with a bold black and white polka dot and the backing is a dark red dot on white corduroy. The overall size is 39" x 39". Like Winter Magic, I used flannel instead of batting and a no-binding finish. I kept the quilting very minimal, just enough to hold things in place. I thought the soft but busy 3-D blocks would be fun for a baby to explore while having "tummy time," so I think of this as a floor mat rather than a blanket.

Linking up with Oh, Scrap! and Scraptastic Tuesday this week.