Rosemary Quilt by Tales of Cloth / Beauties Pageant 299

Until a year ago, I had no interest in English paper piecing. I’m a girl who needs regular finishes to stay engaged, and doing anything by hand takes in the neighborhood of forever. Over time, however, I’ve seen one friend after another embrace, and create truly amazing quilts with, the technique.

Then, last summer, I was faced with some special circumstances: I had to occupy myself while my older son was taking a class an hour away from home. Because of the distance, I stayed near the class site, taking walks and reading books and starting some hand sewing. Pictured here are the fruits of my labor!

I made the Rosemary Quilt from Jodi Godfrey’s book, The Seedling Quilts. This project is not fully hand pieced and perfect for the EPP skeptic. I supersized the sample quilt from the book and made 11 EPP pieces, which I then hand-appliqued onto background rectangles. The remaining blocks without an appliqued EPP design provided an opportunity to highlight favorite prints, including some large-scale designs.

Those solid rectangles are a who’s-who of fabric designers: Kate Spain, Amy Butler, Lizzy House, Heather Ross, and Anna Maria Parry (formerly Horner), among others. For a lady who is famous (notorious?) for using white backgrounds, this Rosemary Quilt is my version of maximalism.

I handed this project to my friend Ophelia for quilting (she and I settled on an edge-to-edge pantograph called, most appropriately, Rosemary!). Then I used one of the featured prints again for the binding. 

I so enjoyed making the EPP sections for this quilt that I started another Rosemary project. I didn’t make too much progress with that second project last summer, but I was in no rush and tucked it away until now. I have two trips planned in the next few months and look forward to whiling away summer nights visiting with family and hand-stitching more Rosemary blocks.

I know some of you are accomplished EPPers. I’d love to see your past projects! You’re welcome to upload them to this week’s linky along with your more recent finishes. : )

 

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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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