#quiltingwitch

Making a jacket I can wear for pride, inspired by the singular ✨Chuck Tingle✨

The color choices were inspired by pride flags. I tried to fit in as many as possible, and I have room on the rest of the jacket to add more in the future. Rather than representing my specific identity I aimed to include as many gender and sexual identities as I could fit. We are all blooming together.

Chuck Tingle’s writing often reminds me to express my joy and creativity out loud, and helps to focus me on creating art through love. I’m so grateful and glad to live in a place where I can celebrate myself and my community. This jacket is an expression of that emotion.

A highlight of my summer- I wore my pride garden jacket to the Camp Damascus book tour, and got my bandana signed! It is now my favorite decoration in my sewing space 💖

Aka

Cozy Swords So Big

I made this quilt for a sword enthusiast, I’m sure they would clock inaccurate sword proportions right away. It was important to me that the (non magical) swords be as proportionally accurate as possible. I based each blade to hilt ratio directly on historical or famous prop references (can you spot them?) and designed them to be life sized.

A very sweet boy’s tail for scale against an early pattern draft

The most challenging part of constructing this quilt was working on the RIDICULOUSLY long blades. Typically individual pieces of an FPP pattern are small and easily maneuvered. My largest blade pattern pieces were about 45 inches long, a design decision I would never inflict on anybody but myself.

The smallest blade- the only one I took photos of because the rest were way too overwhelming to document. The largest pieces were triple the length of this.

Designing the blades to be contained in a single piece of each pattern maximized precision in the parts of the designs that I really really wanted to be smooth and sleek.

The long blades were very hard to construct, it’s easy to end up with bubbled fabric on FPP pattern pieces so large. Glue stick and spray starch were critical here.

My only totally impossible sword was designed in a more traditional fpp kind of way, broken into many small pattern pieces. There was a lot more room for error in seam matching, so this block took me much longer to complete than any of the others. I redid quite a few seams to get as close as I could to perfect.

~Big Booty Bigfoot~

Inspired by my favorite take on this iconic species of cryptid- the Tingleverse style Bigfoot. He could be a part time mummy camp counselor, the leader of a band of environmentalist pirates, or the president. Anything is possible.

Incorporating english paper pieced blocks in a largely foundation paper pieced design

Some shapes are a bad fit for foundation pieced designing. The chunky shapes I wanted for my gems were better accomplished with english paper piecing in 4 of my 7 swords.

I am not experienced at hand piecing, this was my second try ever. I hope to improve my stitching in the future, I’d like it to be more consistent in size and tension.

I found it hard to know how much smaller to make the gem patten, to account for the addition of slight bulk at the seams. I finally got it right on the last gem. (Also the easiest since it had the fewest seams to account for.)

FPP shapes only have Y seams where two FPP pattern pieces are being joined. For example, in the green gem the top group of 5 triangles and the bottom group of 3 triangles were separate pattern pieces.

I don’t think mixing techniques for this project distracts from the overall image, and I got the shapes I was looking for much more easily than if I had stuck to only FPP for the entire design.

10/10 will mix techniques again.