Well Hi there;) It’s been awhile.
I’m looking toward Fall in the studio, or more specifically Halloween. So I began looking through my Halloween Pinboard for projects to hone our skills this coming season with a little more excitement than usual.
I’ve made plenty of Trick-or-Treat bags (though Roan might need a larger one), but this round I had an idea of creating a bucket I could just hang on the inside door knob for handing out candy instead of a bowl. You could certainly add another handle to make it into a bag.
I combined Twiddletail’s paper pieced Skully pattern with the bucket idea to make a new sample for September and October’s paper piecing workshops. I’ve got one more fun project idea with this pattern to add to my Halloween home decor trick out. It’s not necessary to do this pattern in these workshops dedicated to paper piecing, but I thought it would be fun to try something new. There are certainly a lot of free paper pieced Halloween patterns out there to choose from.
Speaking of choices, I not lacking in Halloween/skull print fabric and even added this new Cotton and Steel to the collection. I have more napkins in my future.
I considered it, but ended up going with a more “traditional” print that matched the feel of the paper pieced pattern for the interior and trim.
I quilted the bucket in a simple grid hoping that it wouldn’t obscure the skull and I think it worked out pretty well.
Instead of batting I quilted my panels with a layer of Soft and Stable to give it more structure and I used muslin as backing for the quilting process.
You can see how I’ve tricked out in past years here and here. I’m almost done with some locker bags using the same one-handle idea.
Two more weeks of summer and I’ll be back to this little corner of the world more often. Happy summer peeps;)
All the blocks are 
The wee winks that fussy cutting in some of the points and background creates is fun.
The second fabric variation I played with was light valued points with dark value background. This was another sample idea to show students how value placement affects design. Next time I’ll do the backgrounds so that the fabrics match where the quarters meet. I think it will have a better effect. I love that out of the 20 million scraps I have I managed to place two of the last pieces of the chevron right by one another. Nice job.
The last variation is my favorite. You can really go either direction with the value of the prints, the contrast with the Essex linen is there.
To ingrain the process into a student’s mind we follow the little mantra of steps written on a Post-It note. It eliminates some of the “what do I do next?” when learning.
When students exclaim that something hasn’t come together perfectly it’s nice to point out an example of that same issue in my blocks. Fabric not to size, points not matching, points cut off… in the big picture they never noticed any of it;)
I want to have some secondary design involved in the final layout or at least some corner stones to hard scape the blocks. Whatever happens will be scrappy and traditional in style.
I’m a creature of habit.
