Quilt Reveal: Mended Heart

I am making a baby size quilt for the Dust Off an Old Quilt Book blog hop which starts this upcoming week. I will be sharing it on Thursday. But it means I don't have much time to work on the Project Quilting challenge. I promised myself that I would only participate if I can make something very quick and simple. Before I saw the challenge, I was thinking about an Artist Trading Card (ATC).

Then the Project Quilting challenge for this week was announced. Sew Not a Square. I figured that would be easy because it takes extra work to make something a real square. My elephant quilt last time was a very long rectangle. I don't usually dictate the size of my improv quilts. It is the size it wants to be.

Then I remembered that I had already posted the hearts that I made from a scrap sandwich. How cool would it be if I met the challenge before I even knew what it was! I quickly checked the date, and found that I had posted it last week. That doesn't meet the criteria that it has to be made during the challenge week. Bummer.

 

I dug around on the sewing table. I know I had recently thrown away a bunch of scraps and was hoping I hadn't thrown away the scraps from the hearts. I hadn't. Sometimes being lazy works in my favor.

 I could have made an ATC from these scraps, but I decided to make another heart. That way, I wouldn't have to worry about getting a specific size from the result.

So I cut and "pasted" by sewing scraps together to make a coherent whole.

To the back as well as to the front.

 

Here is the finished project along with its inspiration.

 

 

While I was at it, I made the front legs of Zou the Elephant a little bit longer and added a few other pieces.

It feels strange to call Mended Heart a finished quilt on my list of quilts since it is so small but since it is officially a quilt for the challenge, I have to add it. The other two hearts are incorporated therein and won't get their own finish row even though they were finished on a different date.

Quilt Reveal: Zou

There are a total of 6 challenges for Project Quilting. Usually at this part of the Project Quilting challenges, I participate in fewer of them, so I didn't know how long they last.  I've been doing better this year because I decided to add a challenge to the challenge. Make a quilt you already want to make. That is how I managed the red and white quilt I made last time.

This week, the challenge is to make a quilt that is inspired by a book that I've read. I've been told that twisting the rules is a way to show off my creativity.

The challenge immediately made me think of this elephant. I had watched the Mary Fons video. She had given a link to an Artificial Intelligence website that makes drawings for you. I played with it quite a while and it came up with this drawing of a patchwork elephant. It had five legs, and when I asked it to keep going and complete the drawing, it just added a different elephant made in a different style.

Anyway, making this patchwork elephant is on my list of quilts to make. And I had pink fabric on the table from the pink challenge and I had been using pink fabric for the Dust Off an Old Book blog hop project, so a pink elephant sounded good.

All I had to do was find a book about pink elephants. There were several, but I needed something that as big enough to be a novel and quick to read. Here's the book I found:

  

It's called Murder of a Pink Elephant by Denise Swanson. I was able to get a digital copy from the library so I could get started reading right away. I spent a lot of time reading it, but then I read the fine print of the quilting challenge, and nowhere did it say I had to actually finish reading the book. I like reading cozy murder mysteries so I will finish it next week. I have a quilt to make.

It turns out that I didn't have a lot of scraps from the Dust Off blog hop because it used pretty much all the jelly roll strips, so I clipped off some fabric before I started piecing the back.

 

 I cut some small scraps and arranged them on a fusible. I made it in three pieces.

I pressed them down and cut out the shapes. It is always so ugly and scary at this point.

I pieced the background from scraps and placed the elephant on them.

 

 Sandwiched and quilted. 

Filled in some missing spaces and chose the binding.

 

I started hand stitching the binding, using a running stitch like I did last time, but for some reason, I had to stitch each stab at a time, so I switched to machine stitching to save time.

I just looked up names for elephants, and found out that the Japanese word for "Elephant" is zou 蔵. I call Zoey, "Zoey Zoo Zoo" sometimes so that sounded like a fun name for this elephant. I present to you, Zou.

 

2023: 15 Minutes to Stitch Week 7

 

 

I worked on Zou this week. I finished the Boundless top and have started piecing the backing.

 

15 minute days this week --7 out of 7

15 minute days this year -- 49 out of 49 days

Success rate  = 100%

 

Linked with:

 15 Minutes to Stitch