Valentines Twister

I knew a fun new project was just the thing to get me back into the swing of sewing. Last week, Connie posted this tutorial for making a twister heart, and it was just the thing I needed.

For Christmas I received a set of three different sized twister templates and I have been looking for a project to try them out on. Due to my immense love of bright pinks, I was able to do this project entirely with supplies on hand. Now that did mean using muslin for the background because I didn't have enough of any other pale fabric, but hey, so it goes.

laying out the color arrangement

all stitched! (forgot to take a photo before I started cutting)

Here is the first step all sewn together.  I chopped out the twister squares during the Superbowl blackout.  Cutting the squares out was tricky with the rotary cutter because I was only at the correct angle for two of the four square sides.  I ended up cutting one side out with my left hand and just sort of contorting around to get the last side of the square. Cutting went off without a hitch aside from all that twisting into weird positions.

all cut and ready for round 2 of sewing!

(Side note: I learned the Lil' twister is perfectly sized for charm squares! How awesome!)

top assembled

I poked around the internet a lot for quilting ideas. Conveniently Connie posted a shot of the back of her wallhanging so I could see what she did and how she traveled around the top.  Rosemary has also been finishing off a twister recently, so I was inspired by how she chose to quilt hers.

I ended up doing these little singular feather nodes across it.  It was good feathering practice. I remember from last February's FMQ challenge Diane's phrase that they should always look like teardrops and not tongue depressors - well, I had a lot of tongue depressors.  For the background, I love the texture that pebbling would provide but I knew I would find it tedious, so I did jester hats since I enjoyed those so much from the FMQ challenge.  And the borders have fun (and very imperfect freestyle) hearts on them.

Here is a shot of the quilting. I know I should take some close-ups but there is a really cute kitty in my lap right now!

Now I know people like to read about mistakes, and I am definitely not perfect.  The biggest mistake is that I used pink thread to sew all my squares together, which looked great on the pink blocks but make the thread VERY OBVIOUS through the white muslin. Oh well.  I also caught up the background fabric in some of my border stitches.  My totally awesome solution? Just trim around it like a reverse applique (I am way too lazy to rip out stitches unless I really care.

Where the quilting caught the background - oops. But who wants to do those freestyle hearts a second time?

Anyways, next up it was time for the mini version, using the scraps from the first. One problem I noted was that most of my squares had slash marks in them from the rotary cutter. I don't normally make "mini" things, but this was a ton of fun! And so cute! I sewed in silver this time to prevent the thread from being so obvious.

mini!

This is the point where I should have said "hmm, I should really square this off"

Now the big problem with this one is that it is blatantly not square. I realllllly should have squared it off before I sewed on the borders.

This photo is to show you how horribly un-square this is!

But by that point my laziness kicked in and I said "oh well, whatever."  But it is realllly off. Plus I'm thinking now it would be a very nice size and shape for a potholder, but I would need to put my thick cotton batting in instead of the current batting that's in theere. For now, it will be a little mini wallhanging for my cubicle at work. I didn't really bother to do any quilting on it for now, I assembled it in "pillowcase" fashion.

Big guy and little guy together!

All in all these were very fun to make and I'm proud that I got them done before Valentine's Day! (unlike those owls I tried to do for Halloween but didn't finish until December...)

Thanks again to Connie for the tutorial.