Hey Everyone, welcome back to Stash Blasting Wednesday.
Normally today I would be putting together something with the ruler I highlighted last week on Cool Tool Thursday but since I didn’t highlight a ruler as it was New Year’s Day I had to come up with something else to talk about and create.
I decided to use up some leftover blocks from a tree skirt I made for my friend’s mother-in-law in December. The tree skirt was a huge hit and sometime down the road I will do a blog post about it as the design process was a learning process. So with all this talk about this great tree skirt I’m sure you want to see a picture so here it is.
The tree skirt
Anyway I made far too many Hatchet Template blocks and figured I might as well use some of them up. I had 32 more than I needed – yes I was making a giant tree skirt for I am not sure what size of tree – maybe the one in Time’s Square. Hmmmmm I wonder if they need one? I’m up for that challenge.
Many leftover blocks
I also pulled out all the scraps I had left over just in case I might need something from those for this piece – you never know.
Leftovers pieces and bits
I decided to go with a very simple design that the template package highlights as a pattern. Here it is using the dark and medium valued purple blocks.
Medium and dark valued purple blocks
And now with the dark purple and yellow blocks in a different configuration. One that has two distinct designs due to the colour scheme. With these two colours being complementary colours the design works great and creates a definite X and O with the blocks.
The purple & yellow
I’m going with the dark purple and the yellow blocks. I love that yellow fabric with the silver in it and there isn’t much of it left. No white left – only what is in the scrap bin and none at my LQS because I finished the bolt. [Editor’s note: I laugh out loud when I read/hear Jen saying “I love that yellow”. When we first got together she hated yellow – in fact, you can say that with a capital H!}
I sewed the blocks in pairs. Then the pairs in rows. And finally the rows together. I did pin the rows as there were many seams that needed to meet and even though I have a dual feed foot I figured pinning was a good idea at this point as I really do not like to reverse sew and who has time for reverse sewing – definitely not me. I used my favourite forked pins from Clover as well as their flower headed pins.
Rows pinned together
Before I had the final row in place it looked liked this which I thought would look awesome in pinks for Valentine’s day. I would call it Cross Your Heart. Oh no, another quilt to make.
Cross your heart
With the rows sewn together the piece is 18 ½″ x 18 ½″.
The rows together
In the pile of scraps I found two 3″ x 21″ pieces of the two dark purples and since they wouldn’t be much use for anything else I made a 1″ border with them. Now I need to decide if I want to add another border with the yellow or just bind it.
Purple borders
I’ll decide by Friday when I’ll be doing some free motion quilting to finish off this little X and O table topper.
The rest of the blocks, well they will have to wait for another day and another project – there are ideas percolating in my head for them and it’s looking like it will be more of an art quilt than a traditional quilt. I’ll leave it for one of my UFO Saturdays to work on.
I am really happy with this Hatchet Template from Creative Grids – it is very versatile for the number of designs it can provide and so easy to use.
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Happy Quilting!
