Speck: Love Letters

Since it is very nearly the end of the month, I need to take time to post about my September project for Another Year of Schnibbles!  As usual, I can't wait for the parades that appear on Sinta and Sherri's blogs each first day of the month.  Seriously, it is better than payday!  I also know that it must take a lot of coordination and effort to pull it off each month.  Thanks ladies!

This month's project featured one of the new Little Bites projects by Carrie.  They are patterns designed to be used with Moda's new Candy--packs of 2.5" squares.  I have yet to get any real Candy, however, one charm pack can be cut to yield 4 stacks of 2.5" squares, so these patterns are a great way to use "orphan" (one charm pack only of a given collection) charm packs.  So I went to my stack and looked through my choices and decided to use my charm pack of Laundry Basket Quilts "Sweet Sixteen."

I have to confess that some of these monthly projects are very easy, and some I've really struggled with.  This was another month of struggles!  The whole reason, at least in my opinion, is my fabric choice.  I cut up my charm pack and then proceeded.  The pack consisted of some fabrics that are very light as well as mediums and darks.  My primary problem was that there wasn't an obvious background color choice.  Since many of the lights were printed on a cream background, I couldn't use cream.  I proceeded to go through my stash looking for a possibility for background and nothing wanted to "play nice" with the candy squares. 

Knowing the Edyta is a master of combining prints with batiks, I even checked my stash of those, but no luck!  Finally, when I looked at the larger scale prints (and not all of them are in the above photo) I noticed that there seemed to be a bit of red in all of them.  See it there on the left?  So I pulled out my stack of reds and came across a piece of red "quilters sateen" which I bought over a year ago and have been "saving" for the perfect project.  I wasn't sure if this was the perfect project, but I was determined to use something I already had on hand.

So I started constructing blocks.  I had decided on the "x" version as opposed to the "o" version.  However, I made the mistake of using the same color for all 4 patches that make up the "x" block instead of varying them like the pattern photo.  Was this a problem?  I didn't know.  I laid out the blocks and wasn't happy. 

The possiblility of making both blocks--thus an"XO" quilt was mentioned by other members of our group, and frankly, I had considered it from the get go, myself.  I decided to try that and it only took one seam being ripped from each block to turn the x's into o's.  I'm really happy with my results now.  I think the red sateen, plus the XO makes for a lovely Valentine's Day quilt! 

 

Struggle number two:  The sateen was crying out to be quilted with silk thread.  I could see a lovely feather in the border.  I had the silk thread and I attempted to free motion my first-ever feather!  It didn't work at all.  I'm going to need much more practice on feathers!  I spent two hours ripping out what only took minutes to free motion!  I ended up using a stencil for the border.

 

I am calling it "Love Letters" because of that Valentine's feel.  Plus, it is special to me because I always text "XOXO" to my husband when I want to tell him that I love him!

 

Have a great day!

JoAnne