Sunday, April 21, 2024

Coco Chameleon - A Funky Friends Factory Pattern

 



This month, Island Batik Ambassadors have been playing with stuffed animals!



We each chose one of the Funky Friends Factory patterns and used Island Batik fabric to create one-of-a-kind stuffed animals.

I chose Coco Chameleon. 





For the top of the head and belly, I couldn't resist using an Island Batik foundation print called Chameleon.

For the rest of the body, I pulled some leftover prints from last year's Summer Twilight collection, an original Island Batik collection by Tammy Silvers (Tamarinis). 



Coco went together without any issues.





The pattern has several tips to help prevent sewing pieces together backward.




And a link in the pattern takes you to a set of photo instructions that help with some of the more complicated placements.  I used that a lot.




I love her curvy tail.




And her cute tongue.  
The pattern has instructions for a little flower or bug to put on the tongue but I left that off. 




I used an 80/12 microtex needle from Schmetz to sew everything together.
It sewed all the layers without any problems.





Stop by the other Island Batik Ambassadors pages to see what stuffed animal they chose!
Island Batik has a nice page on their website showing each ambassador and a link to their websites or blogs.

Island Batik Ambassadors



Happy Sewing!


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Posted by at 7:27 PM 3 comments

Monday, March 18, 2024

Give it A Whirl Blog Hop - Double Pinwheels

 



Welcome to the first day of the Give it A Whirl Blog Hop Challenge, hosted by Carol of Just Let Me Quilt. Today I'm showing off my Double Pinwheel Quilt.  It is also my Island Batik Ambassador Project for March, in which we could create any protect we wanted. 


 



For the blog hop we were challenged to create something that included a "whirl". We could use any blocks or fabrics as long as the project had something in it that looked like it was spinning.

I opted for pinwheels and Island Batik Fabric.  I started out with a sketch ...


and then went to EQ8 for my final layout.


The fabric I used is Island Batik Flutter Wings by Kathy Engle.




I used this same fabric for my log cabin quilt last month and had perfect scraps left over for pinwheels.



I decided to paper piece the first pinwheel blocks.



I made a set of warm blocks and a set of cool blocks



Boonky made sure everything was sewn properly.



The second pinwheel blocks filled in the centers between the main pinwheel blocks and the center blocks.


These blocks were sewn with traditional piecing.



Avi sat by while I worked on those.




I was super glad to have the new Oliso Iron that came in my Ambassador box.  Each piece pressed smooth and the top came out super crisp.





Hobbs sent a nice box of batting for the Ambassadors.  For this quilt, I used the Hobbs 80/20 Heirloom Bleached cotton batting.  I love the bleached batting when my quilts have lots of white in them.





The whole quilt was sewn together and quilted with Schmetz 80/12 Microtex needles.








The sunshine sure helps these colors pop!





Be sure to check out all the other whirling projects this week!






Happy Sewing!


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Posted by at 12:01 AM 24 comments

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Stretched Pinwheels and Free Templates


Check out my new Stretched Pinwheel quilt!
It's a fun smaller quilt measuring 66 inches x 48 inches.

 I still had some end pieces left over from my Lugnuts quilt, so I trimmed them up using my Creative Grids 60 degree ruler and started playing around and ended up with this cute quilt.  


Keep reading to see how I put it together. The link for the free templates is at the bottom.





The odd shapes I had left over weren't wide enough to cut into full triangles, so I cleaned them up into longer triangles.  Similar to what you would have if you cut a rectangle in half on the diagonal. 

I was able to get 23 triangles that had the angles going in the same direction.





 I fiddled around and decided to see what they would look like as pinwheels.  They looked pretty good, 




I needed a little more background fabric compared to traditional pinwheels made with Half Square Triangles and when I sewed them together I felt like there was too much white staring me in the face.





So I cut off the opposite corners at the same angle as the pinwheels and...





Added some bright green triangles.  Pink and Green are always a good color combo!




I needed one more triangle cut on the correct angle, so I sewed some smaller halves to make the last triangle I needed. I can't even notice it is mismatched from far away.



I wanted the finished quilt to be a wee bit bigger so I added some 2 inch sashing and a few borders.

The green inner border measures 1 inch finished, and the outer border is 4 inches.






I had more triangles cut on the opposite diagonal and made two more blocks.  This angle made the pinwheels spin in the other direction and didn't look right on the front, so I put them on the back.





Most times, I design a quilt in EQ8 and then make it, but this time I made the quilt first and then drew it up in EQ8.



I wanted to be able to easily see what it would look like in other color ways and to see how it would look with solid triangles.   It was fun to play around with.






 There are many ways to alter the colors and come up with different looks.

Click the image below for a free template to make your own blocks.  The templates makes one 8.5 inch section of the block.  You will need to make four sections to create one pinwheel block.








Happy Sewing!


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