"Yellow Star on Blue" Wall Hanging

Last time I talked about this project was April when I completed the top and basted the layers together. Then I left it hanging on the display board.

I really can't remember over what time period I worked on the quilting, but by January 7 of this year, I had the center portion quilted:

.

I marked all of the lines with disappearing ink and free motion quilted it.

I repeated the back and forth lines on the outside of the star in the center as well, except I made the lines wavy to match what was going on with the fabrics. (This piecing was an improv technique learned at the class where I originally made the center star.)

I can't say I think it looks great. Now I know.

In the yellow part, I did curves from point to point that are similar to what was done in the yellow areas of the wall hanging I have been trying to match.

The only thing left to quilt was the outside border, which would be done in a "square in a square" pattern. I thought if I put the binding on first, I could make sure the points lined up exactly on the edge. But I didn't want to tackle the binding because it included piping and that was just a step to far at that point. So it was left hanging again.

Two things pushed me to pick it back up:

1. It was listed on my UFO (UnFinished Object) list in the Ravelry quilting group. I hadn't participated in the UFO Club in the summer and fall, but signed up again in January for the winter quarter, and even signed up for the "send" group. That means, if I finish a project, people would send me a FQ!! (FQ=fat quarter, a quarter yard of fabric. Well, never mind, it's fabric!) One member went so far as to tell me she had one that she had been saving for me--she knows I like elephants so I have reason to believe I'm going to like that one! ;)

2. Joy at the Joyful Quilter issued a "Table Scraps Challenge", with extra kudos for including the Rainbow Scrap Challenge colour of the month. Although I was making this project as a wall hanging, it could easily double as a table topper. And the colour for February was yellow!

Last week, I pulled this star off of the board and took a look at what it needed. Fortunately I had cut all the remaining pieces because without them, I would not have remembered my plan at all. I chose to use blue piping instead of yellow, in part because I just didn't have any more of the bright glaring yellow that I had used on the other one.

I pulled out my Piping Hot Binding book and tool and applied four strips of piping around the edge in pretty short order.

Then I realized the difficulty with quilting the outside border. The piping is designed to lift up--it's only sewn on one side. So do I line the points up with what was visible? Do I line them up with the actual seam (which was under the piping)? Further complicating it was that if I pulled the piping far enough back to not cover any of the points, the edge of the quilt wasn't going to be caught up in the binding seam. /big sigh

I just did the best I could, balancing the need to capture the raw edge and not covering up too much of the little squares.

After that was done, I trimmed the quilt and applied the first two sides of the binding. Then, thankfully, I tried to fold the binding over the edge to see how it would look...it was too small! It also happened that the binding lined up so that a seam would land exactly at a corner--not good! Obviously, I was going to have to remove it and try again.

On another day, I gave my seam ripper a workout and removed the binding. I trimmed the quilt with the smaller setting on the tool and started again, making sure to shift where I placed the binding! No seams landed at the corners and all was good.

I gave myself one more problem before I finished...when I cut the binding to attach the end to the beginning, I measured perfectly and then cut the angle the wrong way. So instead of the two edges aligning,

they made a big empty triangle. 

Did I throw up my hands and walk away? No, I did not. I sewed in a short piece of binding to fill in the gap, thus giving myself more opportunities to practice the skill.

Then it was done. Oh wait. No. I had to sew the binding to the back, which I did by hand. That was done during daylight hours considering it was dark blue thread on busy fabric.

As with the first wall hanging, I sewed two triangles on the top corners for hanging:

You slide the ends of a dowel under the triangles and it holds the quilt up. On smaller pieces, it's a nice way to avoid having to do a hanging sleeve along the entire top edge.

And here are the two pieces together:

I have to admit I didn't really like how the blue and yellow in the outside border lined up on the two of them. (I have no memory if that was a conscious choice or if that's just the way it turned out.)

But when I displayed them side by side, I liked it a lot more:

There were several design things that went wrong on this latest piece. Some I corrected and some I left. Now that's it's finished, I think it would have been a stronger piece and a better match to the first if the light blue area around the star was filled in with dark blue squares instead. But when I made the original block,

I didn't know this was what I was going to be doing with it! :)

It was an interesting challenge to try and make a match to the first piece a few years later. I still had some of the same fabrics, but had to find substitutes for others. Some things I had to piece together to have enough (like the backing) and other things were solved by a combination--did you notice the narrow yellow border is different on the second one? I had to find a second fabric to have enough to go all the way around. I ended up piecing the fabrics together so that the original is in the  middle of each side and the new fabric is in the corners. (You can see it in the detail pictures of the piping above.)

Linking up with the Joyful Quilter February Table Scraps Runner/Topper Challenge, and

Quilting is more fun than Housework Oh Scrap!

Project summary

Started: Center block made June 21, 2018; wall hanging started February 23, 2020

Finished: February 19, 2021

Size: 18"x18"

Pattern: my own

Material: 100% scraps, almost all cotton quilting fabrics

Cotton batting.

Walking foot and free motion quilting on my Viking Sapphire.

All blog posts about this wall hanging: link

Pink Roses

I tried something new and it worked out. You could say everything came up roses....

You see, I had this "quilt" from the long arm class I took last year. They load up some white fabric for the front so you can really see what you're doing and use whatever they have lying around for the back.


Although we tried out a lot of different things and most of the resulting "quilt" looked like messy doodling, the part where I tried a pantograph was fine. It was a relatively wide spot that had roses stitched on it. Except it was all white and pretty uninspiring.

So I thought, Wouldn't it be nice if I could paint the roses and make them pretty? But I'm not confident with actual paint, so I researched fabric markers. Some of them can be made to look a lot like paint. (Watercolours, in any case.)

I purchased some Fabrico markers so I would have them when I was ready to tackle this new thing. I'm not sure if I was ready, but at the end of March, someone in the UFO club on Ravelry more or less dared me to finish an additional project. (She was promising elephant fabric. She knows my weakness!)

Since this project was the closest of my UFOs to being finished, I gave it a go.

First some practice on the unusable part of the quilt:

Don't pre-spray the fabric with water - that is too wet.

I had the best result when I pre-wet the fabric with a small paintbrush,

and then added a little more water with the paintbrush after I had applied the marker. The colour seemed to run toward the stitches so it was hard to get it to flow toward the middle of the petal or leaf.

I then took the additional step of washing the quilt after I was done practising. This would both test the colourfastness of the markers (passed with flying colours) and remove any fabric treatments or residues that would prevent the ink from bonding properly.

And then I spent an hour or two "painting" roses and leaves. All in all, I was happy with the end result:

I had the perfect pink and white fabric for the binding. I remember buying it because I loved the tone of the pink so much. I have used bits of it for other projects, and I had almost enough left to do this binding.

For the last couple inches, I put in a piece of pink butterfly fabric. It was too dark to use around the whole quilt, but it works just fine for a couple inches.

The backing was a small print of blue flowers. I think it works just fine with the pink roses.

I used three different shades each of pink and green. The leaves were mostly the same, but I made sure to vary the roses. I could not only use different markers, I could also add more or less ink to change the intensity.

At 21"x30", the quilted ended up a little smaller than I would like for a baby quilt. I finished it right around Easter and decided it worked just fine as a table topper! :)