This week's Project Quilting challenge was a fun one:
Birthstones! I am lucky to be an April baby, which means my birthstone is the
diamond, a fact I've always loved. However, that did make this challenge
a little more boring for me and, as a result, I ended up making a whole pile of
projects!
My journey this week actually started on Saturday night, before the challenge
was released. I had just learned that a co-worker was moving on and
wanted to make her a little project to take with her. I started paging
through the
Zero Waste Quilting
book that I received for Christmas for ideas. I have a terrible
habit of getting quilting books and then never making anything from them, so I
thought maybe I'd kill two birds with one stone and make a project from
there. These mug rugs immediately caught my eye as a simple project that
fit the bill perfectly.
I decided to a checkerboard design, with two rectangles each of five yellows
from my scrap solids box and ten print rectangles from the same box.
Once I had the fabric laid out, I used
web piecing
to put them together so that everything stayed where I wanted it to be.
I was delighted to find out that leftover layer cake squares were big enough
for the backing, batting off-cuts from trimming quilts were the perfect height
for these, and that a single strip of binding fabric was enough to bind the
entire thing. However, disaster struck at the last minute when I didn't
realize that my pinky had bumped into the rotary cutter and I got two spots of
blood on the top when I was joining the binding (always use the safety
cover!). So I immediately had to make a second one for gifting.
You can see that some of the scraps I used the first time were only big enough
for one use so I got to pick a few new ones the second time around. I
also like a very chunky binding on my quilts, but realized this was
overpowering on a piece this small, so I did a thinner binding on my gifted
one.
Even as I was making the second, identical yellow mug rug, I was thinking how
fun this was and how I wanted to make another one. My immediate idea was
that I wanted to make a checkerboard pattern and when I saw the theme of
"Birthstones" I knew I was going to do a black and white one to fit
that. This time, I used all prints from my stash, focusing on
black-on-black for the dark squares and low volume with colors in for the
white squares. The back is a fat quarter that I love, but never use
because the print is too big. If you use your imagination a little bit,
it looks like the top of a cut gem, which also fits the challenge.
I'm happy to have finally found a use for this long-neglected piece of fabric.
But I wasn't done yet! I switched over to assembling my
Marble Mystery Quilt
and had a lot of random gray pieces left over. Instead of throwing them
into the scrap box, I decided to use them up right away and go with the
classic pink-and-gray combo. The mermaids on the back are another layer
cake square that I found in my scrap box.
The very last one I made is my orange pumpkin version, which is made up of
entirely scrappy prints. I asked my boys if any of them wanted one and
this was the request that I got. The back is ice cream because that is
his favorite food!
I'm actually pretty impressed with coming up of four different ways to make
such a tiny piece - experimenting on a small scale is much easier than
experimenting with a full-size quilt. These will all be put to good use
and I'm sure I'll make more in the future too, but for now I'm off to baste
and quilt that mystery quilt I mentioned earlier so it will be finished in
time for the reveal parade in two weeks. I'm linking up my successful
finish with the
Project Quilting Link-Up Party!
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