Tag Archives: fall

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The products featured in this post were given to me by Island Batik, Hobbs, and Aurifil.

This month we were asked to create a quilt to adorn a table for the holidays. We were required to use appliqué, though our project could be any size. My Fall table topper finished at approximately 20" square. I used Hobbs Thermore batting. It's a super low loft 100% Polyester batting, which should keep my table topper nice and flat.

I chose pumpkin orange batiks to create a scrappy slab for the pumpkin. This included Cheddar as well as a couple from the Island Batik Clockworks collection. (The background and stem are from Clockworks, too!)

I used the snowball technique for adding background triangles to the corners of my rectangular scrappy slab and pieced in a brown stem. My technique is basically the same as my pumpkin tutorial from earlier this month, with a slightly different stem. To fulfill the requirement of having appliqué in my project I chose Bubbles in Chartreuse to make a pumpkin leaf. A quick online search helped me with the general shape of a pumpkin leaf. I used Heat and Bond Lite to raw-edge fusible appliqué my leaf onto the otherwise completed quilt top. My top stitching on the leaf was done as quilting. I chose to mimic the look of the veins of the leaf.

I was lucky enough to come home from Quilt Market with the Island Batik Solstice collection of 40wt Aurifil thread. It had the perfect options for me to consider using for this project. The first image below shows Brass (#2975), Light Cinnamon (#2335) , and Dark Brown (#5024), and beneath that a peak inside the whole box.

 

My selections strike me as an odd mix of colors for my quilting. I ended up with four colors in three different weights. It's amazing how on their own I never would have put these colors together, but when considering what blends best in each section of the quilt, these four were the right choices!

Light Leaf Green (#1147) was the perfect color for the leaf. I had it in various weights in my thread collections and opted to use the 28wt to outline the leaf and stitch the vein pattern. Dark Brown (#5024) was a great choice for my echo quilting inside the stem.

I opted for Brass (#2975) for quilting the pumpkin. I started by echoing inside the border of the pumpkin, then filled it with spirals (my favorite free motion motif!). Finally, I chose Pale Green (#2880) from my stash for quilting the background. First, an echo line around the pumpkin, then zig zag meander to fill in the entire background. I'm not sure if I've shared about it on the blog, but I'm loving my new-ish open toe free motion foot. Total game changer!

Have I mentioned how I love the gears on the background fabric!?

 

I was excited to enjoy this quilt on Halloween and look forward to its continued use throughout the rest of the Fall, including Thanksgiving.

 

Check out what the other Ambassadors are topping their tables with this month!

I'm linking up to Needle and Thread Thursday and TGIFF.

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Welcome to my stop on Tutorial Week with Finish-a-Long. I'm sharing my process for using scraps to create pumpkin blocks.

 

Grab your orange (or yellow or white or whatever color you want your pumpkins to be) scraps. Depending on the size of your scraps and the size of your desired pumpkins you can use your scraps as is (which I've done with my single fabric pumpkins) or you can piece together your smaller scraps to form a scrappy slab (as shown in the large pumpkin) before constructing your pumpkin. You'll also want fabric for a stem and a contrasting background fabric.

Pumpkins come in a variety of sizes and shapes. Cut the largest rectangle (can be square or not) from your orange fabric.

Background is attached to the pumpkin by adding snowball corners to each corner. To determine the size of these background triangles I recommend cutting squares that are 1/5 to 1/3 the length of your pumpkin's shortest side. Make these calculations using finished dimensions. For example, for my 5" x 6" orange rectangle, subtract 1/2" in each dimension for finished size: 4 1/2" x 5 1/2". Next, calculate 1/3, 1/4, or 1/5 of the shortest length, in this case 4 1/2".

1/3 of 4 1/2" (4.5 divided by 3) is 1.5" or 1 1/2"

1/4 of 4 1/2" (4.5 divided by 4) is 1.125" or 1 1/8"

1/5 of 4 1/2" (4.5 divided by 5) is 0.9"

There isn't anything super precise about the choice you make here. The range of these calculations in this example is roughly 1" to 1 1/2". You can round to the nearest 1/4" for friendlier measurements. Then add 1/2" to your choice to get the dimensions of the unfinished square. Cut 4 squares in these dimensions. I used 1" finished (since it is between 0.9 and 1.125), so I cut four 1 1/2" squares for my corners on this pumpkin.

Use your preferred marking tool to mark the diagonal on the back of each of your four background squares, align pumpkin and background fabrics right sides together and sew on the marked diagonal line.

Trim 1/4" from stitching line and press open. (Tip: if you are working with larger pieces, you can sew a second line of stitching 1/2" from the first so that the remnant you trim off is a finished HST as shown in this previous tutorial.)

The simplest stem option is to include a rectangle of brown fabric on the top edge of the pumpkin. (You can experiment with different shaped stems and even add leaves!) For my stems I cut a brown rectangle the same width as the background square above and 1/2" taller. In this case I cut a 1 1/2" x 2" brown rectangle and two 2" strips of background each approximately half the width of the pumpkin. Piece the strip with two background pieces and one stem piece, trim to same width as pumpkin, and attach. You can center the stem on the pumpkin by folding each part to find the centers and align to attach the stem. I just eyeballed it since in nature the stems aren't necessarily perfectly centered.

Add background fabric to bring up to your desired block or mini quilt size.

Here's a glimpse of all the pieces (except for background strips).

 

Bet ya can't make just one!

This mini pumpkin is made from a 2" x 2 1/2" scrap of orange fabric, with 1 3/8" corner squares. The stem is 1 3/8" x 1 7/8".

 

This Scrappy Slab version is made from a 6 3/4" x 7 3/4" scrap of orange fabric, with 1 3/4" corner squares. The stem is 1 3/4" x 2 1/4". You can find all my tips for making your own Scrappy Slab in my on-demand class.

Happy Sewing!