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I’m making a throw quilt for my sister where every square is an art quilt pertinent to her. She has 2 tea-cup Chihuahuas, so when I saw this pattern for a watercolor quilt with a Chihuahua, I had to get it. I got the whole kit as I have never done a watercolor quilt. The concept seemed easy enough, except for the details for the dog. Those were 42 pieces. I changed a few things, but like how it ended up. I’m going to embroider the eye gleam as there is not way I’m going to fuse a ¼“ by 1/8” piece of fabric. Doing the dog is fairly straight forward, except for some weird reason, at least to me, the pattern is not reversed. According to the directions you use pins and glue and put the patterns on right side of the fabric. NO way. I just switched it so the dog is looking to the left instead of the right. Very glad I started with the dog, instead of the background, or there could have been real problems.
The kit comes with three piles of 2” fabric: light, dark and medium. It doesn’t come with the fuse background fabric with the 2” squares marked. It’s cheap to purchase, though. You decide how you want the background to look and start laying the squares on the sticky side of the fabric between the marked 2” dashed lines.
You work dark, light and medium areas according to the pattern. You don’t have to be absolutely precise in laying the squares because you will be sewing these together with ¼ “ seams on each side.
Once you have the fabric pieces the way you want them, you fuse them in place. (sorry no pics of this)
Then take it to your sewing machine and fold the first row vertically back on the second row, good sides to good sides, with the dashed line in the middle and sew a 1/4” seam. Keep going sewing all the vertical rows and then the horizontal rows, making sure all seams go in the same direction. This is what the back will look like. You can see the dashed lines on the right that you fold on.
Turn the square over and give the it a good steam press. Peel the back off the dog, place it where you want, fuse it and then quilt it. I had hoped to have this finished for this diary, but didn’t happen. I’ll have a pic next week.
For myself, I’m not sure I like the dog just floating on top, so I’m thinking after I put the dog in place and quilt it with invisible thread, I’m going to applique a sort of a bush that the dog is looking out from. I’ll have to play with that idea.
So anyone else done watercolor quilts?
And What are you quilting?
A quick, hopefully not too out of line plug: check out the first book of my new series, Guardian Witches: the Grail Talisman.
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