Pattern Hack! Pixelated Herringbone / Beauties Pageant 298

It was just a matter of time before I hacked one of the patterns from Not-Your-Typical Jelly Roll Quilts ...

Ever since I made the original Pixelated Herringbone, I wanted to make a version from my scrap bin.  Early this spring my sewing schedule was finally clear. It was time!

The Piecing and Fabric Pull

I let my stash and scraps dictate the palette for this version. I found two blues in my stash that worked well together, and I took them to my big bin of 2.5-inch squares. A bunch of Art Gallery scraps in blues, teals, mauves, and grays set the palette. When my scrap bin didn’t provide enough of a particular color or value, I cut a 2.5-inch strip from stash. 

The beauty of the Pixelated Herringbone design lies in the strip sets used in its construction. (It’s a pixelated quilt that takes much less time than you’d imagine!) Once I decided to make the design scrappy, however, I had to veer from my own instructions. 

The chunks of solid fabrics were still constructed with strip sets, but because I was using 2.5-inch squares from my scrap bin, the sections with prints had to be assembled individually. If I were a leader-and-ender kind of gal, I would have gone that route and sewn the prints together slowly over time. I do not sew any leader-and-ender projects, though, and instead sewed all the print units at once. This approach took longer than the original Pixelated Herringbone I made for the book, but the finished quilt top was worth the extra time. I foresee making more scrappy beauties like this one!

The Quilting and Binding

Pixelated Herringbone is a big quilt, measuring in at 64.5 inches by 80.5 inches, so instead of quilting it myself, I passed the torch to Lilo Whitener-Fey of Trace Creek Quilting to do her magic. She quilted the project with an edge-to-edge panto called Hexi Flower. 

I’ve been doing more quilting myself lately—mainly because I’ve been making smaller quilts and have had the time to quilt projects on my domestic—but my straight-line quilting would have fallen flat here. Working with a longarmer as skilled as Lilo was the way to go! 

To finish off the project, I used a stripe from Denyse Schmidt’s 2009 collection, Hope Valley. I tried multiple solids to tone down the scrappiness of the project, but the stripe really drives the idea home that this is a scrappy quilt.

Do you, too, have a giant bin of 2.5-inch squares? A scrappy Pixelated Herringbone requires 480 of them. I wish I could say this made a discernible dent in my bin, but it didn’t!

 

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Windmill Weave by Sewspicious / Beauties Pageant 297

Here in Massachusetts, we are in the home stretch before summer vacation, and I am in all-out quilting mode. My younger son is wrapping up his last days of middle school, and I will be gifting his team of teachers and therapists quilts. This has proved to be an effective motivation for getting projects bound and off my WIP list!

One project that is headed to its forever home is Windmill Weave, a design by Vickeidy Plybon of Sewspicious. The plan for this project has been in the works for a few years, so I’m especially pleased to be able to share it with you today!

The Fabric

The pattern is written to accommodate a single cut of yardage or multiple fat quarters. I knew the two-color version I wanted to sew merited something other than my usual solids, so I cut into my stash of Cirrus Solids by Cloud9 Fabrics.

I bought these fabrics years ago ... They’re lovely, yard-dyed solids, with a texture that gives them more personality than the Bella Solids I usually work with.

Because their weave is looser than other quilting cottons and because I was using white as a background, I hand-washed and machine-dried all of my yardage. In fact, I even used Retayne, a color fixative, on the Amazon yardage, to prevent bleeding.

To be honest, I’m not sure how readily Cirrus Solids are anymore, but I’ve enjoyed the projects I’ve made with them and was happy I had them on hand for this project. (See my Quilt Buzz Bingo project for another example of how I have quilted with Cirrus Solids.)

The Pattern

I am always on the lookout for a cleverly written pattern, and Windmill Weave did not disappoint! If you’re a partial-seam fraidy cat, you can construct the blocks without sewing a single partial seam. I, however, followed a supplementary blog post and sewed all nine of my blocks with partial seams. 

Truly, they’re no big deal! My only words of warning for you are these: For the partial-seam approach with the square throw, I needed to sew 18 strip sets instead of 15. You could buy more yardage to accomplish this, but I chose to get creative with how I cut my yardage. Some of the necessary strips were cut width of fabric; others were cut along the length. In the end, I’m not sure exactly how much foreground fabric I used (I had already used a bit in this quilt). If you follow in my footsteps and sew this pattern with partial seams, be sure to do all the math up front to ensure you have enough fabric on hand.

The Quilting and Binding

I was at a loss for how to quilt this top. I knew I didn’t want to quilt it myself because I thought Windmill Weave’s strong geometry, with all those horizontal and vertical lines, would benefit from something softer and swirly-er than my straight-line quilting.

Taking a cue from the backing, I selected a panto with a circular pattern ...

I considered many different scenarios for the binding. (Doesn’t it seem as if the binding can make or break a project?!) I decided that the binding fabric should either be overstated (think: lime green!) or understated (think: white!). In the end, chose the understated option: I had a light gray in my stash that played off the light gray quilting thread.

Windmill Weave was an enjoyable make. I got to use my AccuQuilt Go to cut out all those skinny strips, streamlined the quilt-making process with strip sets as directed in the pattern, and busted through long-stashed yardage in the process. I might have another Windmill Weave in me. I think I would have fun with a second go by using multiple foreground fabrics.  : )

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Ridiculously Easy YouTube Video / Beauties Pageant 296

The short version of the story I am about to tell is this: Eep! I made a YouTube video about my Ridiculously Easy Jelly Roll Quilt pattern. You can access it below ...

The longer version is that 10 years ago I posted a tutorial for my Ridiculously Easy Jelly Roll Quilt. Then 5 years ago, I converted that tutorial into a full-fledged pattern. This pattern has consistently been my most popular design, and its success is what propelled me into writing Not-Your-Typical Jelly Roll Quilts.

It was time for a little sprucing, however. I added some more illustrations to the pattern, outfitted it with my new logo, and developed some bonus resources that anyone can access.

First off is the YouTube video. Every so often someone contacts me because they work better with videos than written patterns. This video does not tell you how to sew the pattern—to cut the fabric and sew the columns, you need to have the pattern in hand. It does, however, give a broad overview and discusses the issues of selecting fabric and sewing long columns together.  (Ridiculously Easy is a column-based pattern, not a block-based one.)

 

 

(Not going to lie ... It’s painful for me to watch that video! Please ignore the glare from my glasses and every instance of “um”!)

Forthcoming is a digital coloring page on PreQuilt. I already have some designs up on PreQuilt, and you can play with coloring them without having a PreQuilt subscription. Check them out here.

To celebrate this new-and-improved version, the PDF version of Ridiculously Easy Jelly Roll Quilt is just $10 through Thursday, June 19. Pick up the Ridiculously Easy Jelly Roll Quilt pattern in the From Bolt to Beauty store or Etsy shop!

 

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The pageant rules are simple:

• Post your finish in the linky tool. (No links to your own giveaway or linky, please!)
• Point your readers back here with a text link or use the button above.
• Visit and comment on other participants’ finishes.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter