Now brought to you by…the letter S

During the spring, before I really got crafting again, I was stalking following along with the Moda Designer Blog Hop: Spell it with Fabric. Each day a different quilter, or set of quilters, was featured for various letters. If you do a web search, then you’ll be able to track down all the letters as it was a free blog hop. And there are plenty of Pinterest boards showing all the designs.

All the letters were really cute but I didn’t want to make a full alphabet quilt. My boys are a bit too young for that. So I opted for one letter which is the start of both my husband’s and my last name. The letter S. But S on it’s own, while shapely, is rather boring. During the blog hop I saw one designer who had personalized their letter by adding a smaller block within the letter block and I thought that would add a bit of excitement.

The problem was that the designer didn’t add any details about how she added the smaller block. It looked like it was a Sawtooth Star block and I liked the look. The contrast with the curvaceousness of the S with the 8 points of the star appealed. The problem was designing it to fit the S block. I knew approximately what height I wanted the star block to be but the Sawtooth involves half square triangles and, it had been such a long time since I’d sewn, that it took me awhile to figure out how to the size each piece. And I wish I would have saved my calculations…[yet another reason for this blog!]

In the end, I was quite happy with it although it was slightly too large as I wanted to line up the bottom of the star block with the bottom of the top arm of the S. To do that, the top of the mini-quilt ended up being a bit wonky.

Part of the issue was that, when I was piecing this, I hadn’t invested in a 1/4 inch foot. I was having loads of trouble with getting seams to line up. Now I have one – see that beauty below? They are cheap, people, and worth every penny!

I also did some beginning free motion quilting – the trauma of which I’ll post more about in the future.

This mini-quilt is definitely not perfect, in a number of different ways, but I like it anyway. It represents my returning adventure in fabric, which I think is pretty Special.