Quilt Square Project

Have you ever volunteered yourself for something that makes your heart race and you wonder why you offered your services since you KNOW you don't know what you're doing!

I seem to have a gift for doing that.

About 10 days ago a new friend from our homeschool co-op sent out an urgent email asking for help. She needed someone to create a square for her niece's high school graduation quilt. The square needed to be completed by the end of the month and sent off to CA to be added to the blanket.

So...I sent her an email stating that if NO ONE ELSE offers to help, then maybe I could come up with something. In the end, it was all mine.

I do not quilt.

I have never created a quilt square.

I just started embroidering at the beginning of the year.

"What have I done?" I wondered.

Lynn (the friend/Aunt) emailed me the text and sent over the muslin square and I started thinking about design of it all. Ahhh.

Because she chose a verse that talks about the heart, I decided to put the verse inside a heart. I looked through my embroidery patterns and found this:

I liked the heart from this Feb pattern, but not the birds.
It's also not the right size, so I had to enlarge it.

I made a copy of the pattern and fiddled around with the copier until I got the desired size.

Now I needed to find an alphabet to create the text within the heart.
Which meant a stop at JoAnn Fabrics for me - how sad! :)

Of course, the alphabet wasn't the correct size either, so I enlarged it on the copier and then created my template on graph paper.

Then the text was added to the heart. Now I have a completed pattern.

I then taped the muslin to the pattern, laid it on a small lightbox from Katie's Fashion Studio and traced the pattern with a water erasable pen that I found in the embroidery section at JoAnn's.

There was a lot of relief once I had the pattern on the material!

I just had to embroider it.

Because I chose two shades of pink for the heart, that left me with very little color choices for the text. I went back and forth between tans, lavenders and greens. After consulting a color wheel I chose the Granny Smith green. It's feminine, but not too childish, I hope.

Here's the square on our piano bench. It's rather large - about 13 in. squared. I'm really proud of myself for figuring out how to tackle this project. I usually need someone show me how to do something new. Even then I'm intimidated, but this time I DID IT! Whoo hoo!

I've got a few of my own ideas rattling around in my cranium.

I think I'm addicted.

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