While working on another project that will remain under wraps for a while yet, I decided to save my twofers (that's what I call the corner triangles that you cut off when doing stitch and flip triangles on the corner of larger squares or rectangles like snowballs or flying geese). These ones are very small, and I trimmed them up to 1 1/8" square after piecing them with their low-volume backgrounds.
I'm in the market for a mini-quilt gift for a friend so I figured this made a good starting point. Without a real plan, I sewed the tiny half-squares together to create an on-point checkerboard. After that, 6" squares of low volume prints (including one of my old poppyprints) were added as a large border.
I still had a little pile of the jewel tone scraps lying on my cutting mat, so thought about ways to use them on this border. I've been admiring a lot of applique on IG lately and have been thinking about a little project to have on hand for stitch sessions with friends. I envisioned a curvy vine around the patchwork with some appliqued berries scattered around. I dug out my late FIL's old Flexi-curve from his graphic design supplies (which we still keep in a rolling cart: french curves, circle and oval templates, T-squares, india ink, pigma pens, Lettraset...etc) and marked out the curve with a Frixion pen.
I used this technique to machine applique the bias vine, matching the raw edges of the folded bias strip with the drawn line. The 1" berries were prepared this way (except I used a thread spool and stamp pad to mark the circles on the fusible interfacing).
My next step is to fuse them to the background and have them all ready to stitch down at tonight's annual outdoor meeting of the VMQG. I'm not sure where this mini-quilt is headed after that...but maybe someone will have an idea at tonight's meeting. That is the wonderful thing about stitching with friends: there is never a shortage of great ideas!
