My machine is fixed and hums along as it should again. Yay!
So, onto the next project! I took those leftover squares from the Christmas Twister I made, and cut up some more red and some more green from my yard sale box of Christmas fabric, and made a big stack of half square triangles. Then I was at a crossroads of what to do with them. I hadn't thought that far in advance.
Pinterest to the rescue! I found this image that I fell in love with, but no pattern, (edit: I have since found a pattern, here, for a much smaller version) so I dug up my graph paper and drew it out.
I had no measurements from the original, so I just used the hst's I'd made and cut squares the same size in various reds and greens from that yard sale box of fabric. A special trip was made to buy enough white and a few more bits of green from my local quilt shop.
It took about a week to assemble the top, and I tried to let it be random, as long as two of the same fabric were not next to each other.
Some of the fabrics I love, some are ok, and some are just downright ugly. They are not all quilt shop quality, and I'm not even sure they are all cotton, but when they are all put together, it makes for a stunning quilt top.
(Oops, it's upside down, but we'll pretend we don't notice.) Finished size is about six feet on each side.
These aren't cotton, and have nothing to do with quilting, but I've been waiting a couple of weeks for my sewing machine to be serviced, and this is how I've passed the time.
They were a special order request, and I will be popping them in the mail later today.
I had found an advertisement for a box of assorted Christmas fabric scraps for ten dollars. Who could resist that kind of deal? I snatched it up in a hurry! Unfortunately, many of the fabrics are not my usual kind of quilting colors, so it has sat untouched for almost a year now...
Today, the snow is falling and it's looking a little blustery outside, so the itch to make wintery things has hit me. I have a Twister ruler that I've never used, and thought these Christmas fabrics might be just the thing to give it a try. I needed 36 ten inch squares plus a border. There were 42 different fabrics in the box, in all different conditions; some seemed brand new and untouched, some were prewashed, some had pieces cut out of them, some were just leftover scraps from someone else's projects. I just pulled one fabric out at a time, and if it was big enough to cut a ten inch square, I cut it out. It was easy to come up with 36 different squares this way.
I laid them out on the floor and tried to go for a pleasing, but random arrangement. For a border, I opted to go with white.
This is how the pattern instructs me to begin. All the squares are sewn together, and a border is added all the way around.
Then I use this fancy ruler to cut up all the blocks I just put together.
Then I sew them back together in the new arrangement, and I have a completed quilt top like this one. It finishes about a third smaller than it started, and I have a 4" square of each color leftover from the cutting process. I can leave it as is, or I can add a border or two to make it bigger.
Here's what I would do differently next time:
- watch the placement of similar colors next to each other (the two browns in the bottom row, for example)
- if using white as a border, put darker blocks along the edges where the border joins to avoid lights next to white
- solid colors and small prints look best (large prints are just too busy and the pinwheel effect gets lost)
I enjoyed the simplicity of this pattern. The instructions were easy to follow. The ruler has these little grippy feet that makes it a breeze to work with. The blocks were large. It was made in one day, in about 8 hours from start to finish (would be even faster if you used a layer cake precut).
I think I would be inclined to do another one.
