Hello and welcome to my stop on the Plum Pudding blog hop! This hop is celebrating and showcasing Sherry Shish's new signature line with Island Batik and, as always, it's so much fun to see all of the different projects my fellow bloggers have made with the same fabric line.
I chose to create a fun mini quilt to share today. I'm calling it Square Up 😊
You can get the free pattern for Square Up by entering your email address in this form. Doing so will also subscribe you to The Bulletin, which I hope you'll enjoy reading twice a month as much as I enjoy creating it.
The Plum Pudding fabric line has some great Christmassy prints. My favourite is this raspberry coloured poinsetta print. Isn't it pretty?
There are several directional prints, too. I made a point of cutting the directional prints so they'd all be upright when the quilt was sewn together, which took way longer than it should have, but I had trouble wrapping my mind around which way the finished strips would be facing.
Even though I was trying to be careful, I had to rip seams a couple of times, after sewing the pieces in wrong. Somehow, after all that, I still ended up with one block with the trees going sideways! I don't even know how I missed that!
When I realized it, after the quilt top was finished, I told my friend Michelle that those trees grow somewhere really windy because I couldn't be bothered to rip out any more seams. She said I can just tell everyone they're tuckamore, which is a Newfoundland phenomenon. The official definition is "A spruce tree bent and entangled by winds on the coastal shores of Newfoundland." Last summer we found tuckamore caves, where the trees are completely entangled together, and walking into them felt like we were entering some kind of fantasy land. Here are Nathan and Aiden at the entrance to one of the tuckamore caves.
Tuckamore trees are really quite something, with a definite diagonal or sideways growth pattern, so I'm quite happy to have them represented in my mini quilt 😊 And that's how it becomes a design element, instead of a mistake!
Some of my fabric combinations had a little less contrast than would have been ideal for this quilt pattern, which I didn't realize until the pieces were already cut. Turns out, though, I like that some of the blocks are more subtle than others.
I don't often piece scraps to make backings. Somehow that feels like too much work, when I'm so close to being able to start the quilting (my favourite part of the process!). This time, though, since I was only making a mini, and I had a fat quarter that would make up most of the back, I decided to go for it. I'm pleased with how the back looks...and there aren't many seams, so it wasn't much extra work.
When it came time for the quilting, I chose Aurifil 50 wt 2540 for this square stipple design.
I really like how it looks on all of the fabrics, except the white bubbles and the reindeer. Even though it's a light purple, I still find it's a bit distracting on those fabrics. I don't dislike it enough to bother ripping it out, though. #lazy Have you ever left quilting you weren't 100% happy with?
It may be a mini quilt, but the binding is still made of a lot of short pieces. I started out with fat quarters of the fabrics, so I didn't have a lot of anything left that wasn't already cut. I did have enough bits and pieces left to make all of the binding out of one fabric, though, so long as I didn't mind having extra seams, so that's what I did.
Of course, there's a label on one back corner 😊
Sherry has a great group of bloggers all ready to share their projects made with Plum Pudding, so be sure to hop around and see what everyone has been working on.
