December Project

This little quilt uses the Square-in-a-Square foundation from Miniatures in Minutes.  You can find a pdf file for the directions on the projects page of my website.  The finished quilt measures 11 3/4" square.  

Once again, this project adds only two triangles to the “block” rather than four.  So this block:

Becomes this block:

And the Square-in-a-Square foundation:

Can be used to make this design:

Here is the foundation with all of the center fabrics added:

To create the template shape, lay a ruler on the quarter inch line of the foundation and draw two lines on opposite sides of the center square. 

When I create the template (I use heavy duty template plastic), I add the name of the patch for future reference.

I decided to try something different with this foundation.  Normally, I add only one “sew line” of triangles at a time.  I’ve always done it this way on the theory that if I added all the triangles at once, some of them might be likely to fold over or fall off while working on the entire foundation.  But, hey, what the heck, right?  This time I added all the triangles at once.

Here’s a close-up which might make things  a bit clearer:

I was pleased to discover that all the little triangles behaved quite well as I was sewing.  There were only a couple that even thought about folding over.  Fortunately, I was able to feel those as I was moving the foundation across the sewing machine bed and got them straightened back out before sewing.

I liked this approach enough to continue to use it in the future.  I thought it was just a little bit faster (and I am all about this Miniatures in Minutes business). 

Sidenote: Linda saw my demonstration on The Quilt Show and sent me an email with this great tip.  Instead of using Iron-Cleaner to clean off the mini-iron, use a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser.  I tried it and have to say, it worked like a dream.  Thanks, Linda!

Here’s the foundation with all the triangles ironed down:

And here’s the top after all those little “blocks” have been joined using the Fold and Sew technique and the paper has been removed:

The Square-in-a-Square foundation remains one of my all time favorites for design flexibility.  And this particular project gets extra brownie points for being even faster than the 3 hours noted in the book.  Since this foundation only needs to be sewn across once (instead of twice), the sewing time gets cut down significantly.  I didn’t think to time myself – I’m guessing it took between 2 hours and 2 hrs 20 min to prepare the foundation, cut the fabric, sew the foundation, remove the paper, iron the “block.”  Works for me! 

I found the border motif in one of the EQ Quiltmaker Quilt Designs add-on libraries.  I don’t always look for an exact line up.  For instance, with this design, I overlapped the block design a little knowing that I wasn’t going to use part of it (the extra diamonds crowding the corners).  The lower-left corner shows what I was aiming for:

So when I drew it onto Golden Threads tissue paper, it looked like this (notice the red diagonal lines in the corners that I use to help orient the stencil when I trace it onto the paper):

Easy peasy.  I love how simple EQ makes it to size the quilt motifs to exactly the size I want.  

And here’s a picture of the back.  The pretty reproduction fabric was passed onto me by a quilting friend.  The triangles are used to hang the quilt (just insert a small dowel). 

One last note:  I’ll announce the winner of the giveaway tomorrow.  Hope everyone has been enjoying the grand blog tour across the world wide web!