Are there any purple lovers out there? I am. But my step-daughter M is obsessed. With that in mind, I have been on the hunt for fabric for her. She is also extremely picky. I haven't been able to find anything I thought she would love, so I decided to dye some fabric purple.
I had some left over purple dye from the school Field Day t-shirt tie dying. You can read about that post here. I dyed 4 yards of Kona White with purple dye, and just a little teal. I really loved the color, but I didn't quite think it was purple enough for M, so I tried an over dye with red.
Big mistake. It gave me big red splotches all over the fabric. I wasn't liking it at all. M came over and I told her that I really tried to dye her some pretty purple fabric and it didn't quite turn out, but Amy, my dye mixer, said she had a pretty plum I could try to over dye it with. M exclaimed " NO, DON'T TOUCH IT. I LOVE IT!" Crisis averted. As long as M loves it, that's all that counts;)
I am using this fabric for piecing modern quilt tops for Quilt Along Wednesday with Leah Day. I decided to go a different direction then the wonky squares. I am doing wonkified stars. I have been dying to make these, so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity. I really wanted to do a Sparkle Punch Quilt, but I'm making all the stars the same color. I think the Sparkle Punch Quilt would look better with multi colored stars. On the SPQ the stars touch. Being all one color might not be the best option. So I made 13- 12 1/2 in. star blocks....then...I ran out of the grey background fabric.
EDIT! I forgot to mention. If any of you decide at some point to try out this block, here is something to think about. You start out with a block the same size your ray block(part of the star block) will be. then you sew on the triangles for your rays.use the bottom square block as a guide for the placement of you rays. Although this is free-form sewing, you still have to be somewhat mindful of you placement. Do NOT do as I did above. You want the ray fabric to extend past the bottom square. This is because the bottom gets chopped off, and you won't end up with a square in the end.
So if you are short on the ray(purple) fabric, you won't be square. I hope this makes sense.
I can't wait to see this come together.
Question for Leah . This has to do with batting. Have you ever doubled up on batting? I have noticed a few bloggers mentioning that they use 2 layers on quilts. Would this be harder to FMQ and would you need a heavy duty needle? I would think It would make for a warmer quilt, and puffier quilting. Do you have any thoughts on the subject?
Well that's all for now. I have a cool idea coming up for a pincushion that I will try out next week. I hope it turns out. If all goes well I will share. Seriously, I need more hours in the day for all the ideas I want to stitch out;)
Danielle
Will be a fun quilt! I'll be interested to see what Leah says about the double batting. I'm a beginner but have been using mainly cotton for my batting. That would be thick to double up on, but i think if polyester it would be more manageable.
ReplyDeletethanks, June :)
ReplyDelete