Slightly MORE Suessical

The truffula trunk quilt is starting to take shape! See, I told you we just needed a little bit of imagination... That's what Dr. Suess is all about!


So, here's about where we left off last time. I got the wonky strips pieced together, pressed them, and laid them out on the background piece (the blueish-teal color here). You'll see again why wonky cuts make me squirm a little because of all the waste... chop chop!

Sorry for the blurry pic... not sure what happened here.

 

Each colored section was cut (layered with the blue underneath) into a squiggly tree trunk. the scrap edges of the colors, as well as the blue pieces underneath the colored squiggle are discarded (eeek!), no, set aside for another project. Once again, it's important to keep them in order, because each piece fits into only one other just like a puzzle...

 

Notice the scruffy little grey dog in the upper corner... that's my mom's dog Schnoodles, whom we were dog-sitting for a couple days. Apparently, he thinks bags of craft supplies are more comfortable than furniture. Whatever. 


OK... now that all the squiggles are sewn back together, we can see that the bottom edge is nowhere near square. That's just fine! It's free-form and imaginative, and I never expected everything to work out perfectly. Let's add a grassy hill... 

Cut...
...and sewn. Plus a cat.
And that's the top! Now to figure out what to do for the backing... I had a chunk of yellow fabric left over from something (I really don't remember what...), but it was kind of square. So I took leftovers of each colored piece that I had intentionally set aside, sewed them together and decided to piece it into the middle of the yellow. But first, I took a leftover blue squiggle (the one from under the orange tree), and pieced that into the yellow fabric. 

All my leftovers...
Squiggle placement (followed by cut, sew, press)
More help.
Finished back (the backside)
Excellent! Now it's time to sandwich, pin and top stitch! 

Batting (on top of backing)
Top, pinned in place
Always fun shoving quilts through the machine...
And here's a little sneak peak of the quilting! I'm loving it so far, and I can't wait to finish it up! Shouldn't be long now...



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football Blanket Crochet Chart

Image
Here is the chart I worked off of for the football blanket... it is sized for a baby afghan, about 36 by 48 inches, but the chart can be easily modified to make it bigger. I worked the entire blanket in double crochet, and the white laces in the center were made with the tapestry stitch, in which the color not being used is carried across the top of the work and the stitches are made over it, concealing the color. Here's a pretty good tutorial for the tapestry stitch, although as I stated earlier, I did all double crochet for this project, but the concept is the same. For this particular blanket, I used five balls of Bernat Waverly yarn in brown, and almost a whole skein of Red Heart Super Saver in white for the lines and laces. I believe I used a size J hook, which made the project go nice and quick. Adjust the size of yarn and hook to fit your needs- everyone crochets differently! Happy crocheting! :) Update: if you love this football blanket, check out my football
Read more

Temperature Record Cross Stitch

Image
I tried telling people years ago that cross stitch was cool again... and I WAS RIGHT! Pay no attention to the random pet hairs... I'm in this crazy cross stitch group on Facebook that features non-traditional subject matter, from naughty words to feminist themes to potty humor and beyond. While I don't consider it my style to be crass or subversive, I do appreciate the modern approach to a very old craft that is normally associated with "grannies" (not that there's anything wrong with that, either). This group has introduced me to a variety of interesting new project ideas, including the concept of a temperature stitch. Essentially, each day's high and low temperature are recorded in different colored stitches to provide a really interesting visual of our climate and seasons. This whole idea has my head spinning around ways to physically represent climate change in artsy-crafty form by going through the last hundred years and stitching a huge collecti
Read more

Kaffe Fassett Jelly Roll Jam Quilt

Image
Here it is! I tried something new with this quilt, and I'm not sure I was 100% successful. The binding was unusual for me. I normally do the whole 2.5" strip, hand-sewn binding thing, but I wanted to try using the backing as the binding this time to keep it simple. I LOVE this backing fabric ; it's so soft, and it tied in so nicely with the color scheme of the Kaffe Fassett "Tides" jelly roll. I have noticed though, that this particular fabric shows a lot of poke holes, so be careful with pin placement and try to get your seams right the first time around. I worked really hard to turn my edges under nicely and pin well, at least every 2 inches. Unfortunately, as I kind of  suspected, some of the loose ends bulged out in between the pins as my presser foot went over them. Now that I've washed the quilt, I can see that I need to do some seam ripping to fix a lot of little peeks of batting and frayed edged. Sad face. I also noticed tha
Read more