Sugar Skulls and some Misadventures

Sugar Skulls!  It's a Tula Pink pattern from the book Quilt With Tula and Angela by Tula Pink and Angela Walters.  

This was the last quilt in my "to be quilted" box.  It took me almost two years to get through them all  (since I stopped doing customer quilts).  Of course I made more as I went.  But now I literally have no more quilt tops to quilt.  So I guess that means I have to get busy and make some more!  😎😎😎

Here are some close ups of the quilting - spider webs, a few spiders and some "wrought iron" inspired curves in the orange.  The border is one inch piano keys with grid in the corners where they overlap and one inch grid in the skulls.

I appliqued a few flowers in the bottom - I'll talk more about that below.

*********

So what misadventure???

I started off with black thread and lofty ideas of "drawing" spider webs, spiders, rats, snakes and whatever creepy stuff I could think of.  These pix show a bit of what it was starting to look like.

But I decided I didn't like it.  It just looked "scribbly" and my "drawing" isn't good enough - the black thread showed all the glitches a little too much for my liking.  So I decided to rip it all out.  

And, predictably, it "left a mark".

The usual treatment of  spraying water and a finger rub took out most of the evidence.  However, the worst marks were where the spiders were - there were actually holes there.  I picked up some Bo-Nash earlier in June and thought I'd give it a try.  

This is the Bo-Nash powder before being pressed.

When I pressed it, it left a nice crunchy mend (I thought I'd taken some pix of that but I guess I didn't).  I think I used too much.  I need a Bo-Nash lesson.  Anyway, the holes were fixed in that the fabric will not fray out, but it was very visible.  I decided to go ahead and quilt the quilt as I was planning to - with orange thread this time and not be quite so adventurous with the drawing - also, I really just wanted to get it finished at this point!  I decided to hide the holes with applique once the quilting was finished, which is what I did.

I pressed some Heat'n'Bond to the back of some of the flower fabric and cut around the flower groupings that I wanted.  Then I pressed it on while it was still on the frame because I wanted to try stitching around the raw edge with the long-arm.  I did this.  Once I took it off the frame, I pressed it again to be sure it is stuck on really well.  I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out and it saved the quilt.  I wouldn't bother with stitching around the applique next time - I think it's quite well stuck on so it didn't really need the stitching at all.  If it turns out that this quilt actually does get some use, I might consider doing a satin stitch around the applique, but for now, I'm not going to bother.

One final note: I tend to experiment with my quilts - this is one experiment I would never do on a customer quilt! I do try new design ideas and usually like them - but usually the designs are a bit more conventional.  I rarely rip so this is a real exception - I usually don't hate it enough to rip.  I've quilted with contrasting thread before and really liked the results, but this time, it did not make me happy.  It was the glitchy drawing that was the deciding factor - I just was not happy with it.  Will this stop me from experimenting?  Nope.  That's what makes quilting fun - trying out new things.  Usually they work out just fine.  And it's not brain surgery so no one dies if things go sideways!  😎😎😎

Mr. Chillingsworth!

Here is Mr. Chillingsworth.  I picked up the panel and a bunch of coordinating fabric back in 2015 when we were on our little road trip visiting some rural Alberta quilt shops.  And I added some "steam punkish" fabric that I have been collecting here and there.  And some bats.  I drafted the pattern but the general idea came from a free online pattern so I can't claim that I designed the quilt.  It's just blocks with 1" black sashing.  But I like it.  I made the top a couple of weeks ago at a retreat with friends, then finished quilting it a couple of days ago. I'm really happy with how it turned out.  I hung it up in the front entry last night for Halloween.

Here he is, locked and loaded on the frame.  As I usually do, I first stitched the ditch around all the blocks.  With this one, I used black Decobob thread.  I also outlined the black on Mr. C and the printed spiderweb.

Now we're into the regular quilting.  I wanted to do something in the black sashing.  I often just leave sashing unquilted when it is this skinny, but here I thought it wold be interesting to use a contrasting colour and do something a bit fancy to give it a steampunk feel (Victorian).  Now that I have ALL the Glide colours, I had plenty to choose from!  I chose "wheat", which was the closest I could find to Mr. C's background.  Then I used a nice little curly design (#89) from Tracy Russel's Freemotion Quilting 101 book.  And I did spider webs in the black cornerstones.  I am super happy with the way it turned out!

From there, I went on to quilt all the blocks.  Because they are all prints, I didn't want to spend a lot of time on them - can you actually see the quilting?  No - just texture.  I used all Glide thread - only a few colours - a couple of greys, black and wheat. Oh - and I did the stripes at the same time as I did the ditching so they are done with Decobob black - just a line down every other black stripe.