Unfortunately, I don't have ANY photos from any of the steps along the way. I must have been too busy sewing! But I have lots and lots of finished photos...
For the Spring side, I didn't want to spend tons of time coming up with my own original idea. Fortunately, I had the perfect pattern already available. I won a copy of Quiltmaker magazine from Ribbon Candy Quilt Company - who is the designer of the super cute "Skinnies" pattern line. The magazine included a pattern for this "Spring Skinnie."
I adapted the pattern a little bit to make it fit the longer table runner and I think it turned out gorgeous! It was fun to pull out all my spring color scraps and do some matching.
The entire thing is appliqued, except for the borders, of course.
For the Summer side, I really had no clue what to do. I searched Pinterest and eventually found this pin on one of my boards that kind of stuck:
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| Click on picture for link |
Once I had decided to do the Circle of Geese blocks, I sat down with some colored pencils and several small copies of the pattern and experimented with color. These are the three blocks I came up with, all from the same pattern!
For quilting, I knew that I wanted something that would work for both sides of the table runner. Last time I used fusible fleece, so I was able to do custom quilting for each side, then fuse it all together. This time I wanted to use leftover batting that I already had on hand, plus I wanted a thinner runner.
I wasn't able to get swirls out of my head so I ended up using Angela Walters Concentric Circles design from her book Free Motion Quilting with Angela Walters. I was a little nervous about it because I had spent tons of time practicing it on paper and wasn't too impressed with my results. Happily, the design looks MUCH better once it is actually quilted. I really love how the quilting turned out. It is dense, which is good for a table runner. It also adds a new level of texture without interfering with the quilt design, so it is perfect.
I decided to try my hand at curved corners and they turned out great! Because of the curves, I used bias cut binding for the first time ever (sheepish grin) and it worked beautifully. Plus I didn't have to worry about mitered corners! Score!
I auditioned several different fabrics for the binding - some of which probably would have been amazing, but in the end I went with this blue because it seemed the safest. I really wanted something that would work well for BOTH sides.
For my sweet mother-in-law, I embellished a few dish towels. One can never have too many dish towels (especially my MIL. She loves dish towels). These are perfect for summer:
I think the watermelons are my favorite.
Up next... Father's Day!
