Mill Town Block

It is September! So much is happening around here, but first thing first: it is time to share the block I designed for Sew Sisters Canadian Sampler Quilt!  I was so pleased to receive an invitation to participate in this BOM project. Not only do I love Canada, but I share a birth year  and month with my country (albeit 100 years later, but who's counting?) AND I've always wanted to make a two-colour red & white quilt. Canada's 150th birthday seems like the perfect occasion to finally get busy with it. In addition, all of the blocks in this quilt were designed by fellow Canadian blogger/designer/quilters, many of whom are good friends and sewing buddies of mine. It truly is the best celebration of quilting in Canada for me.

MILL TOWN

I don't really consider myself a block designer, but this design is something that I'd been playing around with when my friends at Sew Sisters sent out the invite to play. Read all about my Canadian inspiration for Mill Town Block on their blog here. 

A new round of BOM is starting up soon for this amazing quilt, so if you missed out the first time, you've still got a chance to receive two exclusive patterns per month for 10 months, BUT you have to be quick. Registrations close this month! To see an image of the entire quilt with all of the wonderfully unique blocks, check out the program details here.

I'm regretfully behind in making my blocks every month as the patterns arrive. Luckily I have a retreat coming up next weekend and I'm looking forward to catching up. I already have a setting idea and I can't wait to see if it works out...time to fire up the precision piecing engine. For sure I'm going to tune-up before I begin.

Have you made a special quilt commemorating Canada's sesquicentennial? Tell me about it!

The Canadian Sampler Start

Last year I was invited to participate in a very exciting and patriotic project organized by the clever people at Sew Sisters, a long time partner here at Poppyprint. Having been born in the summer of Canada's Centennial year, it has always been easy to keep track of my milestone birthdays because there's typically a national event around every biggie.  So you can easily guess the whopper of a birthday I'm celebrating this summer!

The Canadian Sampler celebrating Canada's 150th birthday is 100% Canadian designed (by designers from coast to coast) and administered by the folks at Sew Sisters*. You can still sign up! While not generally keen on BOM's or sewalongs because I always lose interest before completing these projects, I have the extra incentive of always wanting to make a red and white quilt. At first I considered going all scrappy red, but most of my stash leans towards orangey reds. Instead, I chose Karen Lewis' Flowerbed print (on gorgeous "Chinese Red") from her first line of commercially screened Kona. The unique block designs don't scream Traditional Sampler to me. I like it.  I'm making it.

Here's the first block, designed by Daphne Greig. It is called Pacific Stars.  The beginning of this work coincides with a short lecture I'm preparing at the request of the VMQG board on the importance of accuracy. As I mentioned on IG the other day, sometimes it feels good to try hard (after a lot of improv work!).

One of the tips I'll be sharing is to piece with geese points on top, to ensure you don't cut off your points with the seam. You can see on the left white point, my seam fell just outside the point (yay) and on the red point, my seam fell exactly on top of the point (which will require a good press). Both worked to preserve the point.

The second block designed by Sandy is so cute. A very appropriate element of the Canadian winter uniform, the toque! We've been wearing way more toques than ball caps out here on the west coast this winter. People are so tired of the snow, but not me. I find it much easier to get through this time of year when the ground is white and the air is crisp. I love snow and always will.

I'm not sure what month will feature my block design, but I'm looking forward to it because I've designed a very cool quilt with it that I'm eager to share. 

*I would like everyone to know that Sew Sisters very fairly compensated all of the designers who worked on this quilt, which is much appreciated in this industry that constantly asks designers to work for free.

Fav Fabrics - Sampler Tutorial & Giveaway!

Fabric and scrapbook design company Basic Grey created a groovy concept for a sampler display canvas. You've likely seen them on other blogs recently - Fat Quarterly had a bunch made up as designer challenges and Amy has done several stunning examples, too. It's cool to see how different people run with the idea of displaying their fav fabrics, notions, trims and even scrapbook paper!

My original plan took a bit of a U-turn. Initially I thought about painting the vines gold and using Christmas fabrics in the circles...sort of a Christmas bauble idea. I considered silk ribbon for embroidering hangers on a few of them, or criss-crossing it over the middle of a few circles as if they were wrapped gifts. The Sharpie Gold Paint pen was a disaster on the canvas. I tested it on the back and it sunk into the canvas with no sheen at all. It was just a dull brown stain. Euw.

So, plan B was Sharpie Silver which looked better (still not what I envisioned, but oh well). Unfortunately, I don't have enough holiday-looking fabric to coordinate with silver so I re-programmed and went with a fav fabrics display for my daughter. She wants us to repaint her bedroom in lime green, purple and turquoise. Hmmm. If I can keep this a secret, it will be a Christmas gift for her. If you'd like to try out a Basic Grey sampler and want some ideas, here's how I did mine:

After the colouring was all done, I scoured my scrap bin for suitable fabrics. Then I cut 3.5" squares of Steam-a-Seam II and stuck it on the back of each scrap, leaving the backing paper ON. Using my GO! Baby and the circle die (thanks Di!), I cut out 2" and 3" circles from the Steam-a-Seam-backed scraps. I also tossed in a few hand dyed wool pieces for a hit of saturated colour. I hadn't considered cutting wool with the GO!, but Paulette recently did a whole bunch and it worked perfectly!

Then I laid everything out with a few buttons and took a photo for reference. All the backing papers were peeled off and, as is typical of me, I chucked the photo and rearranged most of the pieces in a different way. To hold them in place temporarily, I used a Clover mini-iron, just heating the very centre of each circle. This little iron would have crushed the felted wool, so Roxanne's Glue did the job on those ones (honestly, I hadn't intended for this post to become such a product placement....I really have all this stuff and I really use it!).

Now with everything secured, I turned the canvas frame over so I could press firmly from the back to adhere each circle permanently.

I found the whole display rather flat at this point, so it was time for some buttons and embroidery to add texture.

I know the pottery puppy button seems like a complete non sequitur, but if you know D, you know there is nothing she loves more than dogs. I've had these South African-made buttons for ages and this seemed like a place to use one!

Still not completely satisfied, I decided that some ricrac would help frame the whole she-bang so I staple-gunned it around the edges to the back of the frame. A few dabs of hot glue secured it to the canvas. And here you have it:

Now that you see how easy and fun it is to create a display of your fav fabrics, do you want to try one? Have you got a horde of cherished scraps, or bits of baby clothes, or grandma's button collection to display? Basic Grey will send one lucky reader a canvas sampler of their choosing (there are three different styles). If you'd like to leave ONE comment below I will use the random number generator to pick a winner on Saturday morning, Oct.22. The samplers are available to purchase online here.

PLEASE: Your email must be linked to your comment, or written in your comment to win. Use "name(at)network(dot)com" format if you like.

Edited: Comments are now closed, thanks for visiting!