Designing the Hen Party Border

It's taken me a while to organize my thoughts about this border.  I finally realized that it has to be divided into two posts.  So today I'm going to talk about how I came up with the design.

Susan Stewart's amazing quilt "Radiance" won the Bernina Award for Machine Workmanship at Paducah this year.  In this interview she describes how the whole quilt was inspired almost in a flash from one machine embroidery motif.  When I watched it I thought "that's what happened to me!" with my Hen Party quilt.  But now that I am writing it all down, I've realized that's not really true.  The idea for the centre of the quilt came in a flash, but the border took quite a bit of extra thought.

As I've said before, the original inspiration came from the quilt "Peach Cobbler" in Better Homes and Gardens' Sew Scrappy, vol 2, that was published in late 2011.  I took a photo of a corner of the original for you all:

Peach Cobbler

You can see that the designer carried the triangles out into the 2" strip border, and then finished it with 4" squares.  I am a big fan of carrying the block design out into the border, although I intended to complete the diamonds rather than leaving them unfinished.  But I couldn't get it to work with my fabrics, especially when I reduced the size of the blocks.  I thought about using florals in the border instead, but then the border lost all relation to the centre of the quilt.

One day I was looking through the instructions for Sue Garman's "Ruffled Roses," the TQS BOM from last year.  One of her borders caught my eye:

Some time after that I found myself doodling the same border around my Hen Party quilt.  I wasn't concious of the source then, but now I am pretty sure this is where it came from.

With the 1 1/2" corner triangles in my snowball blocks, the cream and brown diamonds that are created finish at 3" high.  I wanted the diamonds in the border to be the same size, and fortunately the math worked out well.  Squares with 2 1/8" sides will measure exactly 3" on the diagonal.  So I decided that Seminole piecing would work well for the borders.

I thought, actually, that Sue Garman also used Seminole piecing in her quilt, but now I see she used four patches:

This image was probably what set me on the track of Seminole piecing:

Isn't it interesting how we pull together inspiration from different sources to make something new? Well, I'm pretty sure several books have already been written on that subject, so I'll stop here.

In any case, the Seminole piecing worked great, and I'll show you that next time! 

Some Good Sewing Advice

Here's something a little different to brighten your day!  A friend found it somewhere on Facebook:

It's funny, because I perfectly agreed with the first paragraph.  I think "Good results are difficult when indifference predominates," is exactly right.  Even the beginning of the second paragraph made sense - "When there are urgent housekeeping chores, do these first so your mind is free to enjoy your sewing."

But after that I lost it!  I don't know how many times I've answered the door covered in bits of thread!  And I have no idea why you'd want to get French chalk all over your fabric.

This newspaper clipping is old and yellowed, but even when it was printed, however long ago, they clearly thought this advice was already funny.  I hope you did too!

Piecing the Snowball Blocks

As I mentioned yesterday, I decided to scale down the snowball blocks for my Hen Party quilt to 6" finished.  When I looked around I found snowball blocks made with different sizes of corner triangles.  I like the block best when the corners are 1/4 of the size of the block, so I needed 1.5" corner triangles.

The block is easy to make.  I cut a great many 2" squares, which is 1.5" plus the seam allowances on both sides.  I drew a diagonal line from corner to corner, and pinned all four corners to the block at once:

Then I sewed right around the block, stitching on the lines, in one pass.  After all the blocks were sewn I went back and trimmed all the seam allowances down to 1/4 inch.

Some people will recommend that you don't trim the seam allowances here, but just iron up the corners so that there are 3 layers of fabric.  I tried it, and it does help to keep the block square.  However, I really wanted to be able to iron the seam allowances towards the dark fabric, so I opted to trim off the excess.  I was glad that I did it, too, because the blocks nested together beautifully when it came time to assemble them.

There is no doubt, though, that keeping these blocks square when you are ironing them is the biggest challenge. I was finally able to use the mini iron and Steady Betty pressing surface that I bought from Keepsake Quilting a few months ago:

I had my doubts about these when I first got them, but they turned out to be very helpful.  The Steady Betty pressing surface is covered with thin foam, which clings to the block.  It also drags a bit on the iron, which is a drawback, but not a huge one.  So it helps keep the blocks square when you iron them.

The mini iron is also great.  It gets very hot, so I was able to just let the heat do the work rather than using a lot of muscle.  Because it is so easy to handle, I didn't burn my fingers once!  And because the iron is very lightweight, I was able to press all those corners while seated, which is another bonus.

Tomorrow I'll show you the borders!