Monday, February 26, 2018

En Provence and Ringo Lake Update and Moving On To the Wholecloth

Joining in again for another edition of "Moving It Forward Monday" over at Em's Scrapbag:

http://emsscrapbag.blogspot.com/2018/02/moving-it-forward_26.html

In my last post, I thought I was done with the updates on my En Provence project since I had finished the top.  However, I had plans for one more touch to add to it and wound up getting it done a lot faster than I thought I would.

One of the quirks of this particular project is that when I started pulling fabrics for it, I found that I had at least one polka dot fabric for each of the colors called for in the quilt.  When I went shopping for additional project fabrics, I found even more so using polka dots became a sub-theme of the project.  Ironically when it came time to choose the magenta "focus fabric" I once again found a polka dot fabric for that too!  So needless to say polka dots abound in this top!


As I got to the part of the mystery where we had to piece the neutral borders for the top, I thought it might be cute to add "polka dots" to it as well.  My original plan was to do that by swapping in a dark square in some of the four patches that make up the last border but that didn't balance out visually.  So instead I decided to applique circles on the border as my "polka dots" instead.

As I found out in a previous project, an Accuquilt  GO! cutter makes short work of prepping circles for applique since you can cut both the fabric:


...and either fusible or (since I planned to do this by hand) templates (out of doubled freezer paper) for turning the circles.  Just cut a smaller circle for the templates than you do for the fabric.


As seen in the picture, I also used the templates from the set of  Karen Buckley Perfect Circles I have to turn the circles.  Since there were only five templates of the size I needed in her set, I die cut the extra freezer paper templates so I could prep more circles at a time.

So now the neutral border has polka dots too!



Also this week, I finally finished up the last of the blocks needed for the "On Ringo Lake" mystery -- Woo hoo! 


Next step for this one will be to put these blocks up on the design wall with the units we had to piece for sashing and play around with the layout.  If you check out some of the linkups for this mystery, you will see that people have employed some creative placements of the sashing units --- and not always as sashing!

However before I get to that, I'll be focusing this week on setting up my wholecloth project.  I've finally decided on the additional stitch elements I want to add and have made templates (in freezer paper again) for those so have to trace them out onto the top.


Since the whole cloth is one of the big "Bucket List" projects for this year and I'm way behind on getting start on it, I'll be taking this week to focus on that.

There's so much more to see over at Em's Scrapbag so why not go and check out what everyone has been up to?

2 comments:

chrisknits said...

What a productive week you've had. I just love the polka dot theme!

Cathy said...

Polka dots always add some fun and happiness to a quilt and what a creative idea to add some to your border.