Matchstick Mansion Quilt Tutorial

When I showed my finish quilt, Mighty Matchstick Mansion, Joyful Quilter asked if I would mind if she made one too.  Due to popular demand, I have decided to show you how I made this quilt.

 I started with some one and a half inch scraps, sewed end to end to form a long chain. Press them all in one direction. These were actually "borrowed" from another project.

I sewed them together, around and around the yellow, log cabin style. It helps to  have an iron close to you as you sew, so you can press after each seam. In this picture, you can see that the green fabric was cut to match the center, and that the green turned the corner to form the next log. You can also see that I lost track of which way I was turning. You can also see the creams and the white turn the corner in subsequent logs.  Because the white was so short, it looks more like an extension than a turning of the corner.

See that teeny tiny sliver of cream at the top of the block in the picture above? If that sliver had been any smaller, it would have added bulk to the seam for no reason. 


For purposes of this discussion, pretend the left fabric is the current quilt top and the right is the fabric chain.  Before sewing each new row, I placed my fabric chain next to the quilt where it was going to go. It gave me a chance to see what the new addition would look like. If I did not like the match, I could place the chain on another side of the quilt, or I could turn the chain upside down and see if I liked that way better.

This audition also helped me figure out the size.  If the chain had a seam at exactly at the right place where it would have been cut off, I took out that seam.  This happened more often than I thought it would.

If there was going to be a seam at the bottom that would add bulk without adding color, I could adjust the size of the top of the strip so there wouldn't be a seam too close to where the next seam would be at the bottom.To fix that, I could adjust the top of the strip chain. If I cut an inch or so off from the blue scrap, then that would change the placement of the white scrap and I could just add that inch to the bottom of the strip. If the top scrap is too small to cut a whole inch off, I could just cut off a little bit and throw it away.

I cut the chain to the size of the quilt before sewing it on.

I ran out of my chain of fabric pretty soon and had to cut more pieces. Here you can see that I lost my log cabin, and it turned into a mansion.  It seemed like there would be too much orange if I sewed it on the right side so I sewed it to the left side instead.  Then as I added more rows, I just added them wherever side of the block I wanted, sometimes by chance based on which way the quilt was facing and sometimes because I liked the added row in that spot. Sometimes I did it to avoid skewing the quilt. I have heard you are supposed to sew in opposite directions to avoid skewing, so sewing in different ways I think helps keep it square.

Just trimming the quilt helps to keep it square helps too.

When I got to the point in the picture above, I realized I was focusing so much on the orange that I had lost track of light and dark. To me, even though this was a good size for a small quilt, there was too much light on the top right and too much dark on the left side. It could be okay, like sunshine and shadow, but I wasn't going for that look. It just happened that way. In order to fix the balance, I had to keep adding more rows.

As I added more fabric to the chain, it was very tempting to choose fabric more selectively. Is this fabric too bright? Is this one too dark? I decided that all the fabric in the box was fair game for this quilt and I was going to let serendipity take its course, which was the plan all along. It also meant that I was not allowed to selectively place the lights and darks to fix the problem I saw in the picture above this one. As you can see, the problem fixed itself without my help. I think if I had tried to do it, I probably would have over-corrected and added too many darks on the right side.

I was having fun making this quilt and decided to go ahead and make it big enough for the Project Quilting challenge. At some point when I am dead and famous, the curator at my quilt museum is going to decide to display all my quilts in size order, and will be disappointed that there is a gap between my small, bulletin board size, quilts and my above the couch wall hangings, and she will be happy to have a few quilts that fall between these two sizes. You're welcome, future quilt curator.

Since both my cutting board and my ruler were 12 inches square, it became a little more challenging as the quilt grew. Keep adding as many rows as you want until the quilt is the size you want it to be, and save the rest of your fabric scraps for future quilts.

Sandwich, baste, quilt as desired, trim and bind.  I think this ugly step is added so you can really appreciate the final product.

I think this quilt would work better as blocks instead of just one big quilt. If you have more than one of these going at the same time, you could chain piece them. I had to use another quilt as a leader / ender.

I got the idea for this Lego quilt from Tonya Ricucci of Lazy Gal quilting way back in 2011. Her idea sparked by an antique quilt is to sew rows to make a rail fence. She spent a lot of time auditioning and making sure the colors and fabrics balance.  I think for a scrap quilt, the viewer's eye is going to go all over the place anyway so I don't think all that effort is really worth the time. Most issues will work themselves out, like they did in my quilt. Chawne Kimber also made this quilt with a chain like I did, and she added some log cabins to her quilt too instead of just using straight rails.

I hope this tutorial helped, and if you do make this quilt, I would love to see your rendition!

Week 6 of 15 Minutes to Stitch

Since it is Sunday, it is time to recap my stitching this week.  I worked on Mighty Matchstick Mansion most of this week, and thought about the borders for the improv rail fence quilt.  Today, I also worked on my other quilts, Sunlight in Winter and Butterfly Wreath because I had neglected them for so long working on deadline projects.

15 Minute sessions of stitching this week:  7 out of 7
15 Minute sessions of stitching this year:  41 out of 41 sessions
Success Rate: 100%

Linked to:
Life in Pieces 15 Minutes to Stitch 
Oh Scrap! 
Silly Mama Quilts Works in Progress

Quilt Reveal: Mighty Matchstick Mansion

In order to use up my scraps, I decided to make a rail fence quilt.  This quilt is designed to use up the scraps that were too small to fit into the rail fence quilt. These are all one and a half inch strips that are too short for the rail fence quilt.  So they are more like matchsticks really.

It took a long time to cut up the scraps for this quilt, because it is supposed to use leftovers from the rail fence quilt, named Fourth Rail.  I had to cut the scraps for Fourth Rail, and then the leftovers were used for this quilt. Sometimes I cut up a scrap of fabric and Fourth Rail used them all and there wasn't anything left big enough for this quilt, so I had to move on to the next scrap.  Also since this quilt is one block, I sewed more of Fourth Rail as a leader/ender, which meant I was making two quilts at the same time.

Some of the more astute viewers may wonder whether it is a courthouse square or a log cabin because it has elements of both.  Well, it is both. No, I take that back. It is neither. It is a mansion.

And because little matchsticks are able to make something like a mansion, they are pretty mighty. So this is a Mighty Matchstick Mansion.

It finishes at 16" x 17 1/2" and since it is bigger than a breadbox and was made in the correct time frame, I am submitting it to the Bigger Than a Breadbox Project Quilting Challenge.

Once I figured out I was early for the challenge because the deadline is noon on Sunday, not Saturday, I quilted it some more and cleaned off some of the stray threads.

I really enjoyed making this quilt, and it is very tempting to change my original plan for Fourth Rail and make it improv rather than traditional, but I am going to keep going as I have been. That has always been my biggest issue with making a long term scrap project. There are so many great ideas, it is hard to stay committed to one until it is finished.

100 Circles for 100 Days

Yesterday, I showed you some circles up to 87. Today is Day 100, and it was my hope to catch up and have 100 circles made to commemorate the milestone of 100 days. Let's see if I was successful.

The photos turned out to load out of order so some of my explanation will make more sense as you see the other circles in this batch.

Circle 88 

This circle came much later in the batch, when I realized that most of the colors I had used were not primary colors, and since I started with them, I wanted to make sure I maintained continuity with using red.  I had also realized earlier that I had not been including other shapes besides circles very much so I used triangles and squares here as well.

Circle 89 

This simple block breaks a lot of rules. I used a selvage here. I usually don't use selvages so this breaks that rule.  I also had the circle be the same fabric as the background, and I don't think I've done that in this quilt.  I also didn't sew down the square and left the ends loose.  When I sew this square to the others, the ends will extend into other blocks. Since all the other blocks are self contained, this breaks that rule.

Circle 90 

I pieced the X on this one so all the circles in this batch wouldn't be applique circles. The background fabric is also right side down because I wanted a lighter yellow.

Circle 91 

This one uses leftovers of Circle 95 which was made first. The circles made a square!

Circle 92 

This is a leftover of circle 96. It uses an embroidery stitch. The others are too neat and I wanted a messy one in the bunch.

Circle 93

I've been wanting to make a bulls eye block, and I know this one isn't one exactly, but I didn't feel like making four blocks and only being able to use one quarter of all of them, at least not  now when I am working under a deadline. This is the first one in the batch where I only sewed down the center and left the edges free.

Circle 94 

I saw a circle in a corner on another blog, and realized that all of my circles are relatively centered, so I had to break a rule I didn't know I had!

Circle 95 

The circles are cut out of a square. One of the 1857 blocks uses this idea.

Circle 96 

I wanted to use a whole circle, and got this fabric from my stash. I want to use mostly scraps for this quilt, but this is a rule breaking quilt after all. The fabric does all the work here.  I just cut out a circle and slapped it on the background.

Circle 97 

This is another attempt to use primary colors. I haven't used blue and green for a while.

Circle 98 

This uses scraps from Circle 99.  I wanted another messy one and really like the asterisk circle.

Circle 99 

 I've been using brown a lot as my dark background and wanted to use something different.  The plain circle looked boring so I decided to add the purple scrap.

Circle 100 

Woo hoo! I did it! I made 100 circles in 100 days.  This one uses other shapes in addition to the circle, and uses green.

Scenic Route

As a present for you for sticking with me for 100 days, I also want to show you the finished rail fence quilt.  When I pieced it, I was thinking of roads, since I pieced the dark strips together. When I was making it, I thought about adding pieces on the side so the road would be continuous but decided against it.

I quilted a small circle around that drop that showed up on its own, and using other circular things from around the house to add more circles randomly in the quilt. I used a washable marker to mark the lines and then when I was done, became worried that it might not wash out.

You can see that the marker was able to wash out.  I rinsed it in cold water, following Allie's suggestion to avoid detergent.  There was one fabric that didn't want to let go of the dye, but it washed out also.I did get a chuckle out of the thought that I could have circles in my circle quilt that weren't actually in the quilt.

This little doggie wanted to model the quilt.

The back uses a cute dog fabric playing in the yard.  I appliqued a square on the left as a label.

In retrospect, I do think that this quilt could represent road trips and getting lost and going around in circles.  The key is to just relax and take the time to enjoy the scenery.  I am going to call it Scenic Route.

It was a beautiful sunny day outside again, and even though the doggie wants a nap, I thoroughly enjoyed making circles today and showing you Scenic Route.

Linked to:
TGIFF
Let's Bee Social #113
Scrap Quilt Challenge

Circles 79 - 87

Here's another batch of circles for the Quilty 365 Circle project. Mine is currently named The Rule Breaking Quilt.

 Circle 79

I already showed you Circle 78 which is on the left. It uses leftovers from the Adrinka quilt.
Circle 79 is on the right. An apple is not quite round, but I thought it was close enough. It was a scrap of fabric I picked up to trim and decided to turn into a circle instead.

 Circle 80

 I used a pieced background because I wanted something different that didn't look I made these batches at a time.  I was piecing it as a leader and ender while quilting the leftover rails quilt, which meant that this one finished before the other ones that were being prepped. I think I am going to choose the arrangement in the quilt for this batch, but I have to number them to show you.

Circle 81

PBS (Create TV) had a six hour marathon where they showed quilting shows. My allergies were really bad, so I couldn't do much work but it did give me a good excuse to watch all of them.

I'm pretty sure that all the shows were reruns but since I don't get up at 6am to watch tv, I had only seen a couple of them which had aired at more reasonable times.  It was nice to put faces and personalities to some of the names I had seen on the internet.

One of the techniques they presented on Quilting Arts was layering the fabrics, sewing circles, and cutting the layers.  Then using machine embroidery to embellish.

 Here is me butchering this technique. I put the layers in an incorrect order(I think the background goes in the back  not the front)  and cut the black line way too skinny so it is hard to see, but I like the way it looks here.

 Circle 82

The reason my dining table is not rid of scraps that need to be trimmed for scrap vortex is that I keep bringing more downstairs.  This is one I brought downstairs. I want to keep making plain circles because that is absolutely allowed and I don't want people to forget that. I like that this one is dark and sedate. I used embroidery stitches around it which you can't see very well in the picture, but it will be a nice reward for people who bother to take the time to look at the individual circles.

 Circle 83

 Another do, using a small scrap from the railfence quilt.  This one makes me hungry for All Sorts candy.

 Circle 84

One of the scraps I brought downstairs was a bag of leftovers from the Daisies Do Tell quilt. (That quilt is sandwiched and holding my safety pins for ransom.)  The scraps are very tiny, and only some of them have fusible on the back of them.  I had the fusible out anyway as I am tracing the blocks for the 1857 quilt, so it was an easy decision to make these.

 Circle 85

This one uses leftovers of a circle block which uses leftovers from the rail fence leftovers which uses leftovers of the rail fence quilt. These pieces already had fusible on them so it was a simple matter of arranging them and sewing them down.

 Circle 86

These are more leftovers from the Daisies Do Tell.  I wanted to make a circle out of shapes that were not circular.

Circle 87

The glasses were supposed to be the circular part, but they didn't turn out as circular as I wanted, and the background fabric wasn't flat enough to use so I cut it out and appliqued it on a new background. This one one represents my new pair of glasses, although they don't look like that.

I have also quilted circles on my leftover rail fence quilt.  I used a green washable marker to draw the circles and am hoping that it washes out.  Poor Zeus was so confused when I brought out different sizes of  plates but no food!  Yesterday with my allergies, I chose a sedate green for the binding, but today I cut out a bright orange. I want to hurry and bind it so I can get it washed before the marker becomes permanent.

Linked to:
Move it Forward Monday 
Linky Tuesday

Too Long To-Do List

It's been a few days since I posted, and although I have been doing quilty things, they didn't seem very post worthy.  I had a large list of things to do, not an official list, but things that I had been planning on doing.

• Quilt leftovers quilt
• quilt rail fence quilt
• clean up sewing area
• prepare scraps for vortex quilt
• catch up on circles
• start 1857 quilt

I have been making progress on much of it, but each one took other steps that slowed it down.


For example, I found a fat quarter that was perfect for the leftovers quilt.   But the leftover quilt is almost exactly the size of a fat quarter, which meant I had to do a little piecing of the backing to quilt it.  Not a big deal, but I hadn't expected that.  It is  now sandwiched and ready for quilting.

It's also snowed several days, so some time has been taken out for snow shoveling, which I also enjoy doing.

Most people did not find a mistake with the balance with the rail fence quilt, but I had already taken a set of blocks out to fix it.  Here's the revised version. Hopefully I didn't do anything to make it worse.  This means I have met my goal for the month for OMG, although I do hope to quilt it this month too.

 I've been working on cleaning the sewing area / dining table, which mostly means trimming up scraps into rectangles. There are a lot of pieces that aren't rectangles because of all the improv and applique I have been doing lately, but I started a nice stack and the dining table looks much nicer. I just have to trim the rest of the scraps and put away the bigger pieces in the storage area.

I have bought,  washed, dried and ironed the fabric for the 1857 quilt.

I was trying to focus on cleaning the area before working on anything new, such as the 1857 quilt or the circles, as a way to motivate the cleaning, but it seems to backfire.  Do you know what happens when you don't make the circle for the day?  There are two, not one circle to make the next day.  They keep adding on, making it harder and harder to catch up.  Even though I enjoy making the circles, this fact makes me lose my motivation.  My 100th day is coming up on Tuesday, and my goal was to have a post entitled "100 Circles in 100 Days."  I need to make lots of catch up circles so that post can happen.

Linked to:
Amanda Jean at Crazy Mom Quilts

Rail Fence Happenings

Yesterday, I promised to talk about rail fences today, so here I am!

The reason that the Cultural Fusion rail fence became sidetracked was because it needed more blocks to make the layout.  And I have misplaced the book, and because I had forgotten the size I had cut the strips to make the block.  Even if I looked for and found the book, it might not have matter, because I'm pretty sure I had altered the size.

It turns out that it was a simple matter of measuring the parts of a block that was already made and I was good to go!

The purple fabric was already out, so I must have chosen it for this quilt, and the B&W fabric was in my scrap box and in just the right amount. It was used in my improv quilt using one of Sherri Lynn's scores.

I have been sewing together all of the leftover rails end to end and I added the leftover rails of these blocks to the chain. I kept the values the same throughout the chain - all the darks in one row the lights in the other.  Since the leftovers were done, I considered different options.  It is a little hard to show since the rails were in one long chain.

 Alternating light and dark.

Alternating two rows of lights and two rows of darks. I like this better because it better emphasizes the darks and lights.

Courthouse square or log cabin  While this method intrigues me, I had already used it for the Elephant improv so I decided not to make another one of those.

I cut the pieces to one size and sewed them together. While I did reject some combinations because I didn't want big blobs of one color or fabric in any one section of the quilt, for the most part, I just combined them as I picked them up.  I think this is how the Mile a Minute quilt is created.

Here's the finished top.

The whole time I was making it, I expected it to be horizontal. But the seam allowances took quite a bit of the length, and now it is wider than it is long when you look at it this way.

I like the little raindrop or teardrop that wound up in this piece.

This is the same picture turned vertically so you don't have to turn your head.