Kim Diehl Half Square Triangle Cat Mat

Half Square Triangle quilt layout

In a change to the usual Farmer's Wife Sampler quilt blocks I have another little project to show you.  It is another mat for the cat, using up the left over half square triangles from last years 'Scrappy Challenge'.  You won't remember that because I haven't shown you yet.  I am interested in trying out different layouts for HST's and there were enough left over to make this mat.

Quilting Feathers

I also wanted to use the project to test my quilting skills.  For over a year I have been practising  drawing feathers, but did not have the courage to try it on an actual quilt.  The muscle memory you gain from drawing really does help and when I took to my machine, they came out naturally - what had I been waiting for!

Quilted Cat Mat - Kim Diehl fabrics

The fabrics are the Kim Diehl leftovers from the Dear Jane quilt, which is still waiting to be quilted. Even with Dear Jane, my 2017 Scrappy Challenge and this small project, I still have plenty of fabric to make MANY more quilts.

Anna Maria Horner Scrap Fabric Feather No #2

Anna Maria Horner Feather

A few weeks ago I mentioned that after making my scrappy Half Square Triangle quilt I had created a new set of scraps to use up.  They were mainly 1.5" strips from reducing 5" squares to 3.5" squares, so were quite thin and some of them quite short, but plenty big enough for another Anna Maria Horner scrap feather. 


Box of fabric scraps

I was working towards a particular colour scheme, so was able to pull out all the co-ordinating colours to foundation piece the feather.


Foundation Piecing Scraps

For the quilting I stitched in the ditch and then did a 1/4 inch outline around the feather shape.  Then I kept on going.  Because these are only small quilts / mug rugs they are a good place to experiment with new quilting patterns.  The trimmings from the HST's for this feather were only a drop in the ocean from my box of scraps, so I can see more of these in pipeline.


Scrappy Anna Maria Horner Feather Mug Rug

 Linking up with Connie at Freemotion

Anna Maria Horner meets Victoria Finlay Wolfe meets Celtic Solstice - Triple Whammy Mini Scrap Quilt Project

'Celtic Solstice Feather' 18.5 cm x 38cm

I expect many of you will recognise this pattern.  It is an Anna Maria Horner feather pattern which can be downloaded FREE from her website.  I have admired these feathers for a long time and the design was subconsciously on my To-Do list.  I think I only needed to do one to get it off the list.

'Celtic Solstice' Fabric Scrap basket

This basket of scraps has been looking at me since January from when I completed Bonnie Hunter's 'Celtic Solstice' Mystery Quilt.  I just needed the right project to use them up.  Just one of these lovely feathers would be the fix I needed.  I slightly reduced the size down to 90%, as I originally intended it to be a mug rug 'sort of thing'.  Now it is complete I might hang it on a wall.

Foundation pieced feathers

Because the scraps really were 'scraps', the lengths were quite short, some thin, so a whole family of feathers were not really the order of the day.  Using pages from an old Radio Times for my foundation paper, I randomly stitched down the strips, and then cut out the feather pattern.

Feather - Anna Maria Horner pattern

I love how the unruly scraps have been tamed into this shape, a shape that reminds me of a school tie.  It looks so neat.  The pattern was quite easy to put together and dragged my dormant dressmaking pattern cutting skills back out into the workroom.

'Celtic Solstice Feather'

After lots of auditioning from my fabric stash I decided to set my 'Celtic Solstice' Anna Maria Horner feather off with a  Moda 'Weave' #9898 grey fabric (I think I will need to add more of this to my stash), and a binding of a pink spotty fabric from the Chez Moi 'Boutique' range.

'made fabric' for quilt backing

For the back I wanted to try out another technique. This time is was Victoria Findlay Wolfe's 'made fabric' from her book ' 15 Minutes of Play'.  Again, the idea was to use up the scraps from my Celtic Solstice quilt.  I did this all from memory without actually taking the time to take the book off the shelf.  It took quite a while (more than 15 minutes ...) as I got caught up in quite a few cul-de-sacs, but I got there in the end.


Back of mini feather quilt

Here is the back of the mini quilt using the 'made fabric'.  I machine quilted it with a stipple, but I will admit that some of the seams of the 'made fabric' provided quite a lot of resistance and it would not be a backing fabric of choice in the future.

So, something a bit different here from Fabadashery.  Have you tried anything new today?