#keepsake calico

It’s DONE! And there’s a story to this one!

Back in December, I met my friend @natural-blogarithm IRL for the first time, and they asked if I could find a use for this pink bird fabric they’d picked up from a secondhand fabric store, since it was juuuuust about a yard, which was too small for either of us to use for clothing as plus-size sewists.

As it stands, when I looked up the details from the selvedge it’s pretty evident that it is, indeed, quilting cotton. More specifically, it is from Michael Miller’s “Tweetie Pie” collection.

Lucky for my friend, I did in fact have an almost immediate idea for this fabric. You see, I lost my cool a little during the great Joann clearance sales, and among my frantic purchases was this almost luminescently-bright 108” Kona cotton Candy Pink.

Why did I buy that??? It’s so bright! There was so MUCH of it, at over a yard and a half of length! What was I thinking????

But it turns out that pink was in fact the PERFECT solid to marry the orangey-pink birds and the more cool-toned wavy pink 1-yard cut that I also bought from Joann. I will learn nothing from this experience.

This was another first for me in that I did not use any pre-cuts! I looked up Sew Can She’s 3-yard quilt patterns and picked Dream House, since it, too, was pink. I futzed with the cutting instructions to allow me more control since both of my patterned fabrics were directional, and between the tree branches and the waves I wanted to give an impression of upward movement. This also meant modifying the block piecing instructions so each block’s long edge was “flipped” compared to its opposite-hued neighbor. The current effect is less “structured staircase” and more “dancey avant-garde windowpanes.” I REALLY like how it turned out in the end!

I did learn that I need to get better at precision cutting and piecing, but I am letting myself down easy. When I was almost done with my block piecing, I realized my sewing machine needle was a millimeter and a half off the center of the needle plate, which meant I was giving all of my seams a fat quarter inch seam. So I just. Continued doing the fat seam bc I didn’t wanna go back and seam rip like 80% of my blocks. Definitely taking it to the shop to see if they can fix that for me now that this one is done.