Quilting Mod : August 2020

Friday, August 28, 2020

Mini Charm Muffins Quilt Along with Fat Quarter Shop

Welcome! Today's project is the sweetest little wall hanging or baby quilt.

I'm joining Fat Quarter Shop's Mini Charm Muffins Quilt Along which is part of the Shortcut Series.

Fat Quarter Shop has a kit available featuring Apricot and Ash by Carey Yoder, or you can pick up the free pattern and choose your own fabric selection for the 34.5" square kit. I chose the adorable agrarian collection, Farm Charm by Gingiber. which balances red, aqua, and neutrals.

While I used to always pick black, white, or cream for backgrounds, I've grown to love other options. This time, I went with Kona Azure. The binding is Strawberry Lattice.

I would do a few things differently in hindsight. For one, I would not hide a dozen mini charm squares from myself by laying a cutting mat out of the way and over the top of them. I couldn't find the missing squares for the life of me, and had my suspicious that one of the four children quarantined within my household were responsible... until after I cut additional squares from the binding fabric, took apart enough 9-patches to intersperse the replacement squares, and put the blocks back together. Figures!

Secondly, because I'm a bit compulsive (um.. okay, a lot) it bothers me if fabrics are going every which way. If you can pep-talk your mind into being chill about topsy turvy, perfect! If you're more like me, I recommend you make the sixteen 9 Patches first. Then add the stitch and flip triangles to three of four corners. Make sure you have an even number of 9 Patches exempting each corner (four of each arrangement). Trying to keep track of which 2.5" squares needed a corner added with all of them separate required far too much concentration to keep them oriented upright.

For the quilting, I used my walking foot to do some echoing in the sashing. Then I filled in the squares with loop-the-loops.

For the mini charm squares, I did a design from Making Connections---A Free-Motion Quilting Workbook.

The backing is Farmhouse Floral by Nancy Neiman for Penny Rose Fabrics.

Check out the Fat Quarter Shop blog for their post featuring all the participants.

Welcome back for a new month of Quilt Block Mania. This month the theme is Back to School, whether or not that is a real life possibility. In any event, here's to all the paste eaters!

The color scheme has pretty, earthy tones this time around.

We will do some paper-piecing on this one. Download the pattern. Make sure your printer is set to 100%, or bad, shrinky things happen. Piece Section A.

Cut a 3" x 2" pale green rectangle and (2) 2 1/4" x 2" light green rectangles. Attach a light green rectangle to the right and left sides of the light green rectangle.

Cut a 2" x 2 3/4" red-orange rectangle, (2) light green 2" squares. Press in half diagonally. Place one in the top right corner, matching the raw edge. Stitch a 1/8" from the edge of the rectangle to hold in place.