Lumos/Nox

Hey y'all! Some of you may know that I am a bit of a Harry Potter fan (and I know that I'm not alone). My dear lovely friend Amanda is too and when her birthday rolled around I knew that I needed to make her an HP-themed present.

Originally, my only two ideas were Harry Potter and mini quilt. I started thinking about the spells in the books, then I remembered Elizabeth's Refrigerator Magnets alphabet pattern (which I also used here), and then I spotted all of the wonderful scraps of Constellations I had left over from making Orion.

In case you don't know, Lumos is the spell used to illuminate a wand's tip (like a flashlight) and Nox is the counter-spell that turns that lights off. For the Lumos portion of the quilt I used the light blue fabric to reflect the casting of light, and for the Nox portion I used black fabric to reflect that that the wand light was out.

I love Lizzy's Constellations line so much - it is just too too perfect! I still have some scraps left and I might just need to hoard them for awhile.

When it came to quilting this little guy, I knew that I wanted to put some sort of picture from the series into it. Originally I was going to do a lightning bolt that echoed out, but while looking at various symbols associated with Harry Potter, I spotted the sign of the Deathly Hallows and knew that it was just perfect! I traced the single symbol out using a washable pen and then echoed around it used the width of my walking foot as the measure.

I used fabric from The Ghastlies for the back which I not only thought worked well, but was also my little ode to Severus Snape. The binding is Sketch in Mist.

I'm happy to say that this mini arrived at Amanda's house last week (only a little bit late for her birthday) and is now up on her wall. It was pretty hard for me to give this little guy up because I really love the way that it turned out, but I knew that Amanda would appreciate it and she sent me some pretty awesome goodies recently too including a handmade Harry Potter tote - I'll have to share that one soon!

Are you a Harry Potter fan? If so, which is your favourite book and/or scene? I might just need to make myself a little HP mini and could use some inspiration!

Introducing... Doughnut Kiss!

Hey y'all! So, it's been a little while since I've been seen around these parts, I'm finding that with work and some other goings on that I don't have quite as much time to sew as I would like. That's not to say I haven't been doing anything though - I'm still working away on my Hermione socks, am writing a new quilt tutorial (yay!) which will hopefully be here soon, and have been finishing up my sample for my Sewing Summit class.

Since, I'm trying to make a fresh start, I decided that I might as well welcome myself back to this space (haha!) with a little something for you! Since my Sewing Summit English Paper Piecing class is less about the pattern I'm sharing, and more about tips and tricks for EPP, I thought that I would share all of the templates and such for my sample here. How does that sound?

So this is the sample I sewed up recently for my class, and I'm hoping that I'll be able to sew up another quilt version that includes interlocking Doughnut Kisses. I don't even know where the name Doughnut Kiss came from for this, but I just thought it was so funny that I'm sticking with it!

Now, I'm not going to go into a whole EPP tutorial here, but I'll give you a couple of tips. Since these pieces are a bit bigger (2"-4" sides) I used the EPP method where you sew through the templates rather than just whipping around the corners like I demonstrated in my QAYG Hexie Coaster tutorial. This helps to keep the 1/4" seams from popping out away from the template.

Even though I included a template page for the 2" squares to download, to be a bit more environmentally friendly, I recommend just cutting the square from a regular piece of paper. You can get 20 2" squares out a regular A4 piece of paper - you will need 21 square for the pillow so just cut the remaining square from the scrap generated by cutting your other templates.

I just wanted to share the back because I love it! I did the standard envelope back that I demonstrated in my Not-You-Traditional-Log-Cabin-Pillow tutorial (it's even the same size so you can use all of the same measurements). This is the first time that I've ever finished the whole way around a pillow with binding and I really love the look!

The templates for the squares and both sizes of the elongated hexagons, as well as a colouring sheet featuring the interlocking design can be found here. Just a note on the templates, all sides should measure 2" except for the long sides are the larger size of elongated hexagons which should measure 4". Be sure to print out the templates at 100% without scaling; if you have any problems, you may need to fiddle with your printer a bit.

Here's just a little example of a coloured in sheet. The sheet contains a finite number of sections so if you want to make it bigger you may need to do some creative taping together. For the crosses you can be super scrappy, or go more tonal with you colour choices. It's really up to you and each different combination of fabrics will create entirely different looks!

I really hope that you enjoy the templates and I'd love to see any example using the Doughnut Kiss templates that you come up with!

Templates Download