Sawtooth Star...The Borders Quilt-along...

Round 3 of The Border Quilt...quilt along!! Sawtooth Stars!! Make sure to check out Patterns By Jen for the pattern if you are just joining me. This is a cool quilt with mulitple borders which leaves lots of room to personalize and make it your own!! Go to her blog HERE to see how she makes these stars and find the other blogs sewing along!!

If you remember from my first post HERE, I am going really scrappy and quite spur of the moment designing with this quilt. The fabrics used in this round where literally the top ones in the magical gray tote of fabric....check out the first post to see that I am not lying!!!

Jen writes great easy to follow instructions in her patterns. I just tend to be a rebel and usually go my own path...I cut my pieces with the AccuQuilt.

Unassembled sawtooth stars....all cut with the GO! 8" MIx & Match Qube. Isn't that animal print just so adorable!! I have very little of it left from a Dahlia quilt workshop in my guild. It found the perfect place to live in thie Borders Quilt.

If you don't have one of these cutting gizmos in your sewing room....you should...I am not affiliated, just a fan!!

I choose to make 8 sawtooth stars and fill the remaining spaces with large scales print fabrics.

We haven't seen the sun here in Northwest Iowa for 2 weeks, with the last week being cold and rainy!! Most of our crops are still in the fields that have water standing in them like you see in this photo from our patio this morning. At least it isn't snow...which I am guessing Jen has today!!

So working with these bright, happy and colorful fabric was a total bright spot in my life last night!!!

Photo fail!! Like I said...cold...38 degrees and WINDY.

Indoors for the photo today.

Bookmark October 24 for the next round!! See you then!!!

Lucky readers today!! I was part of an online Row Along--you can read that HERE.
There was an Electric Quilt giveaway which is now closed....BUT Electric Quilt has offered a great discount code to all my readers!! 20 percent off any EQ product except classes. Great deal!!
The coupon code is: STBSRA20

The expiration is October 23, 2018

 Nancy - Masterpiece Quilting

 Vicki - My Creative Corner3 

Becca - Pretty Piney

 Kate - Seams Like A Dream

 Terri - Lizard Creek Quilting

 Joanne - Quilts By Joanne

 Marija - Mara Quilt Designs

 Alison - Little Bunny Quilts

 Stephanie - Quilt'n' Party

 Daphne - Daphne Greig

 Tara - The Quilt District

Bloom Maker

Bloom.
Maker.
A play on words of the fabric collections used in my April assignment--Adventurous Applique--for Island Batik Ambassadors. Blushing Blooms has a gorgeous range of colors in the red-pink-purple ending with orange range. I also used them in Happy Soul last month. Maker is a cool graphic fabric collection from Art Gallery Fabrics--this one is from my personal stash and not supplied by Island Batik. But I so wanted to use it here as the colors were perfect and I wanted to show that mixing contemporary print fabrics with gorgeous batiks can bring about an amazing finished product!!

I started out by sewing 2 1/2" squares together for the petal shapes. I know you are going to ask--Terri--why did you cut apart fabric and sew that same fabric back together??? Well, I didn't want the background to look like just a big plain piece of fabric.

Can you see the slight variations of color in the 2" squares on the right. This happens because the weave of the fabric is turned in different directions when those same colored squares were sewn back together. I know it is just slightly different--and it might not be super noticeable--but it gives just the right amount of color change and visible texture with the seams to give the project life.

Who doesn't love a closeup!!!

Petals all ready to go!!

If you were paying close attention, You would have noticed that I had the table runner all loaded up on my longarm--ready to quilt--but the petals were nowhere to be seen. That is because I wanted to try a new technique--aka too much in a hurry to put fusible web on petals before cutting them out!!!
Elmer's glue stick to the rescue. After gluing the petals in place, I planned the quilting path to include appliqueing them down while quilting. By doing this I never had to break thread--which is a long arm quilter's dream.

The circles were added as my intersections were a bit too messy for my liking--but a happy addition to the finished product!!

 The new growth of spring blooms are starting to appear here in NW Iowa, so I couldn't resist some photographs of them with Bloom Maker.

To end with--here is a quote from Elise de Wolfe...

I'm going to make everything around me beautiful, that will be my life!!!