Today at school I took down my Love wallquilt and the thought occurred to me that I needed to make something for March to replace it. Here is what I came up with.
I searched through my stash of green fabrics and tore off strips of varying widths. Then I put them in a bag to make it easy for me to just grab a strip and start sewing! The strips are foundation pieced onto a rectangle of batting.
Using some Steam-a-Seam and clipart depicting shamrocks, I traced the designs on one side of the fusible web. After ironing the web to the opposite side of my green almost-solids, I cut out the shapes. The last layer of paper came off and I ironed the shamrock shapes onto the strip-pieced background.
The next step will be to blanket stitch around the shamrocks with some variagated 12 weight thread. I plan to use the new Sulky Blendables I got this weekend. I will do some free motion quilting as well, then trim and bind up the finished wall hangings.
UPDATE:
I quilted both of these up using the new thread. It was harder than I had hoped and involved some ripping out stitches and researching possible causes of the problem on the Internet. Here's the problem-- I had the 12 weight thread in both the bobbin and on the spool. That is WRONG! Once I changed the bobbin thread to what I regularly use (Essential Thread from Connecting Threads) it worked much better. There was still some thread breakage to contend with, but I muddled through.
In the end I decided not to bind up and finish the one with the lighter green shamrocks. I stashed it in my scrap bag not knowing what I would do with it, but reluctant to toss it in the trash yet. The other one is bound with a pieced binding made from green scraps, machine sewn as is my preference. It is at school decorating my classroom and was even used as an example of how to deal with your efforts not working out right away.
UPDATE:
I quilted both of these up using the new thread. It was harder than I had hoped and involved some ripping out stitches and researching possible causes of the problem on the Internet. Here's the problem-- I had the 12 weight thread in both the bobbin and on the spool. That is WRONG! Once I changed the bobbin thread to what I regularly use (Essential Thread from Connecting Threads) it worked much better. There was still some thread breakage to contend with, but I muddled through.
In the end I decided not to bind up and finish the one with the lighter green shamrocks. I stashed it in my scrap bag not knowing what I would do with it, but reluctant to toss it in the trash yet. The other one is bound with a pieced binding made from green scraps, machine sewn as is my preference. It is at school decorating my classroom and was even used as an example of how to deal with your efforts not working out right away.
Hi What a cool idea, love the greens, Cheers from New Zealand Marie
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