Frosty Jolly Wall Hanging

August means time for Holiday quilting! Two weeks ago I completed the "What did you call me?" Witch Appliqué Wall Hanging. This weekend I decided to take a go at Frosty Jolly a pattern by Happy Hollow Designs. I actually picked it up last year during a Black Bag Saturday, along with the about 15 fat quarters it requires, but being pregnant and tired I just never got around to completing it. 

My quilting happens when C naps, so today's project time was from noon to 2pm. I did get a jump start at 6am while playing in C's room, he played with some toys while I read the pattern and noted the count of how many of each color of squares would be needed. 

For this pattern the squares are 1 7/8th inch each, and there are about 300 squares! Don't worry it's an easy assembly line process for cutting and for sewing. Fusible grid paper makes this project manageable and beautiful! 

To start the project I began cutting out all of my squares. I am very lucky to have just recently purchased a fiskar 6" x 24" slide cutter. This ruler and cutter combined is able to cut through up to eight sheets of fabric at a time.

Since I needed to make  1 7/8 inch squares I took my fat quarters and cut them in piles by color. Each fat quarter I cut two rows from the 21 inch long side. This enabled me to get a bout 10 perfect 1 7/8 inch squares from each row. 

After getting all my squares cut out, I took time to change piece my half square triangles which are the only other shapes and the pattern. There were three orange/ white, seven black/white, 20 purple/green. 

After these were chain pieced I cut the half off that was not needed, then took them to the ironing board to be pressed. As I have learned From the great Jenny down of Missouri star quilt company, I pressed all my pieces to the dark. This ensures any white pieces will not have the dark fabric coming through on the back of the seam. 

Once my half square triangles were complete I begin the process of setting up my fusible grid paper to build the project on. 

The instructions call for the fusible grid to be done in two pieces, one being the snowman's hat, the other being the snowman's face and earmuffs. I decided to start on the face and earmuffs first since it is the larger piece.

For the layout of the face and earmuffs I chose to begin by marking up my fusible grid paper. The version I have by Pellon has gold grid lines which to me is a bit hard to see. So I took my pink Frixion highlighter which disappears when heated and I sketched out the center grid and the earmuffs and locations of the HST's.

 With these in place I moved forward in laying out the squares. First all my half square triangles.

Next, all of the purple earmuffs!

 

You may be wondering, "Katie, why are you not placing the right next to each other, there are little gaps." Have no fear, it's supposed to be that way! Remember I cut squares 1 7/8th inches? Well that 1/7th of an inch missing is the gap you see and once we sew the fusible grid those gaps will disappear. Here's a sneak preview:

Now that I've given you a preview of the magic I'm going to show you how I got there.

With all the pieces laid out, it is time to iron them to the fusible grid paper!

First step is laying down the appliqué pressing Matt, I put the packaging on the ironing board as well to show you which one I have. I have link to it in the beginning of the blog if you're interested in getting one for yourself.

The next step is ironing on top of your pressing Mat to secure the squares to the fusible grid paper. I am lucky enough to have an Oliso iTouch iron, so when I place my iron on my ironing board if my hand is not on it it has little feet that pop up so that nothing can get scorched.

As you can see some of the squares are not fitting on the ironing board, so after I secure the top rows I move the fusible grid paper up on the ironing board so that I can secure the bottom rows. Diffusible grid paper works sort of like batting does the grid squares usually can help keep the fabric on the paper even if you haven't been able to iron it down yet.

The look above is all of the pieces fuse down to the grid. 

 The next step requires The excess feasible grid to be cut away. You can see below that I cut off every extra piece of feasible grid including the sides of the corners.

Now that this step is done it's time to sew! The directions said just sewing horizontally on the gridlines first, switching back-and-forth which side you start with. That's too much thinking for me to switch back-and-forth, so I always do the horizontal first but always start on the same end of the grid paper. 

Here is what the first line sewn looks like. Nothing too fancy, a quarter-inch stitch right next to the grid line.

When you open up the line you can see that there is no longer a gap between the two rows that have the same line. 

It is important to check in between each row in case one of your squares did not fuse properly and is not so all the way into the seam line. If that happens you will need to use a seem ripper and re-sew that small section.   If that happens to you, don't worry it happens to the best of us. I have great example pictures to show below.

Whoops! 

Since this square didn't get sewn into the same line, as you will see in the picture below I removed the stitches with my seem ripper and then place the square back in the right spot and sewed the gap shut. Which fixed the issue.

Thankfully I only had to deal with this twice during the process of doing the snowmans face and earmuffs, below is a picture after the horizontal lines were completed.

The next step requires clipping between the vertical seam lines, for this I used my rag quilt clipping scissors. However a standard pair of sewing scissors can be used as well.

Clipping the vertical lines allows you to then fold the grid paper vertically to so the next set of seam lines.

Their directions for this pattern tell you how to get the already sewn seam lines to fold in the correct direction when you are pushing through your sewing machine. I have never been able to figure out how to get that to happen so I just charge forward and my back of my grid paper is a bit bulkier than it should be, but it has never cause me a problem and completing the project.

Seriously, the best part of this paper is that all of the squares match so perfectly. If you have ever tried to so to half square triangles together and get them to match perfectly you know it is not an easy feat. As you can see between the picture above this, and below this diffusible grid paper makes the nose for the snowman come together beautifully.

After all the vertical lines are so here is what the snowman looked like.

The next step was to move on into creating the snowman's hat. So I already had the squares cut out all I needed to do was prepped the fusible grid paper,  lay out my squares, and get to sewing.

This part is still a work in progress but I will continue to update in a new post to show how the two pieces come together, in addition to adding the back in and batting to complete the project.

Gifts Galore!

Most of today was spent enjoy football, food, and the company of our friends. However, this evening I took some time to do a few quick quilting projects. 

As I mentioned yesterday evening, I wanted to make the Tissue Holder that was featured on the Riley Blake Designs website. To do this all you need is 3 pieces of 4 by 6 inch fabric. To make the tissue holder you form it inside out, then sew around the outside and invert to have your Right Sides showing. This was really quick and looks way cuter than carry around a plastic stash of klennex. I plan to make a few more of these, likely one with the peacock fabric, and the others from different fabrics I have a good amount of. 

Completed holder, showing tissue inside :)

Completed Holder Closed

Once completing this little project (less than 15 minutes!) I decided to see if I could reverse engineer my coffee coaster from yesterday to use less material. The Riley Blake Design pattern for the coffee coaster/hot pads calls for 5 squares of equal size, one square is your backing, and then the other 4 are ironed in half, and when you sew it together and invert it only 1/2 of each fabric still shows... this lead me to wonder if you really needed the underside of fabric. So I took the corners that I had cut off my Christmas Tree Skirt and used the seam ripper to borrow the 1/2 triangle squares then I cut down the 5 inch corner square to the size of the 2 half triangles (because they were cut just over 1/4 inch they weren't a full 5 inches together). Once I had this done I laid the fabrics the same way requested by the original pattern, but I did Wrong Sides up so when I inverted the Right Sides would come through. The results were just ok. In the original design the middle points of the fabrics meet but aren't sewn together which looks fine, but with this there was a good amount of gap, so I took my hand at sewing a few extra lines in to hold down the middle better.  The coaster turned out to be usable, but I wouldn't do this for future coasters, the original way was better. 

What I consider the Top

Bottom of Coaster

Once this was complete I decided to go back to the original pattern;  I had 15 charm squares left from my Mr. Claus set I'd ordered for the Christmas Tree Skirt, so I ended up using them to create 3 more coasters to go with the one I completed last night. 

Complete Set, Fronts of Each. To get the centers to meet I ended up pinning them and then sewing the outer border. 

Two Fronts, Two Backs. The Merry Christmas Fabric is on the back of all 4, 2 are Red, 2 are Green. It was the only fabric that required it go a specific direction so I figured I'd match it. 

So far that's what I've done for the evening, I might try a few more things but we'll see. I'll be sure to update if I do!

10 Minute project!

Quilted coaster! So easy to make, take 5 charms, iron 4 in half, stack on top of batting, sew around all corners, clip corners, turn inside out, and sew new border and tada you're done!!

Learned it from Riley Blake Designs Website Tutorials, you can find it here.

Front Side

Back Side

Day One, Week Two: Table Runner Project

Wow! I've made it one week, seven whole days since I have begun quilting and I feel like I'm getting the hang of this! 

Today I decided to see if I could find a Christmas Tree Skirt Quilt project, I found a really cute one from the Missouri Quilt Company, which they have YouTube Video for how to make. I watched the video and thought I can make this, so I headed to their site and found they were still having a great Cyber Monday sale, in addition their always $5 flat shipping. For the skirt you need to have 2 Charm Packs (a pack that comes with about 40-42 5" squares of different fabrics bundled for you!) and a border and backing fabric. I purchased all three of those items plus the deal of the day (a charm pack of fruits/veggies prints for 75 cents!), and a marking pin that erases with the heat of the iron all for $35. That order should be here by next week, so I think it will be my week 3 project. 

For my week two project I settled on a Holiday Table Runner pattern I found on McCall's website. Now sure the pattern says it's for Halloween and you need 9 types of fabric, but I knew I could do it with 5 fabrics and in a Christmas/Winter motif. For the table runner instead of each border being different I alternated the outer 4 borders, and had a unique border in the middle surrounding the center square. The challenge with the table runner was it got large fast and was not the easiest to sew. 

Two things that came in handy though: 
1.) The extended table on my sewing machine. I added the extra legs and that helped keep the part of the fabric I wasn't sewing up and out of the way. 
2.) Pinning the strips. Everyone who I watch in YouTube Videos who have been quilting for a while say pinning isn't always necessary and they hate it. Thankfully my quilting instructor had agreed with this sentiment but still made me learn to pin anyways. I used those pinning skills to make sure all my patches lined up properly. 

Here is what the completely sewn together table runner looked like just off the sewing machine:

Top View, notice there are triangles at the end of each row. We take care of those in the next step.

Closeup so you can see the fabrics and hopefully my decent sewing efforts :)

Once all my strips were sewn (ps if I'm using the wrong kind of "sewn" please let me know!) on I  had to cut the table runner down to the right size. Scary! So the cutting instructions said to leave 7.25 inches from the middle of the silver squares, the problem is my table runner is twice the length of my cutting pad so I had to do it in 4 cuts. Thankfully math again came into save the day and I was able to keep everything straight.  Here is where I left off at the end of the night with the table runner. 

Cut to Size! Full Length View. (Would have put it on the table but that's where all my quilting stuff resides.)

Cute Fabrics Right? Who Needs 9 Different patterns!

After I finished sewing the last strips and cutting I had to retire for the evening, but there is definitely more to come on this as I plan to make this my first finished project. Meaning, I better find a video on how to add batting, a border, and "stitch in the ditch!"