February 2015 Project Of the Month Tutorial

Redwork Snowman Wall Hanging

The POM this month is this Redwork Snowman that I gave you a sneak peek at at the end of last month’s posting.  Here is a refresher photo for you.

 

I love working with the combination of stitchery and piecing in a lot of my small items. I feel that I can personalize it for a certain person. So let me tell you more about it.

This one starts with a subject search.  In this case I wanted a snowman.  The nice thing is that you can shrink or enlarge any drawing to fit the size you desire.  Now for the centers there are different ways to find the image that you would like to do.  One is the internet search of free coloring pages and clicking on the “images”  tab.  You can find just about anything that you can think of.  Another source would be coloring books.  Believe it or not, but I find the “Dollar Store”  or other discount stores coloring books are the best with their simplistic pictures.  Here are some examples: 

     

The first thing I do is find a piece of muslin. It can be bleached or unbleached depending on your preference. This time I used bleached muslin since that is what I had on hand.  I found the snowman in the Nov./Dec. issue of the  Michigan Country Register newspaper that is free in your LQS.  I took it with me and had the drawing enlarged to fit more of the 8” X 11” paper. 

I took the print out and taped it to the window so that I could trace the snowman onto the muslin. You can also use a light box if you have one. I always put my images on much larger pieces of muslin/background fabric then the actual drawing. About 2.5 times larger then the picture. This allows me to have room to place it in a hoop while I stitch.  Another reason is that it is better to cut down the center, then to have to piece your center.  I also prefer to use a pencil with a sharp point when doing my tracings.

Once you have gotten the picture into the hoop for stitching, I use 2 strands of floss for the stitching.  In this case I use DMC’s #323.  I like a plain ordinary outline stitch verse the stem stitch. You can google it or contact me if you have any questions on how to do that.

Okay now you have stitched your little picture, trim you picture to the size that you are looking for.  Mine is approximately 8.5” X 11”. Now to find the center of your block.  I usually fold my into quarters.  This helps me find the centers of my HST’s rows.  You can see how that works later on down the page.

From there you can add the contrasting sashing like I did on mine.  I used strips that were 1.25”.  Sorry it looks like I forgot to take pictures of this stage as I was working.  I had included it later before adding the HST sashings.  This brings the size to approximately 10.5” X 13.5”. 

Now it’s time to make the little 2” HST’s that surrounds the contrasting sashing.  For this I had a mini charm pack sent to me in one of my Secret Pal boxes here on QB.  I found that I really liked the 2.5” squares for this. So you make your HST’s using your favorite method.  Here is some pictures that I took as I was making them. 

        

This is my favorite method.  And I tend to use a scant 1/4” seam.  I like to chain stitch pieces at one time because it uses less thread.

      

This allows me to trim up the blocks to the necessary size. In this instance it’s becomes a 2” block when I trim them.  Of course you have to iron the HST’s open with the seam to the darker color or the red side as shown below.

     

Our next step is to trim them down to size.  See pretty they look once the shed those unnecessary threads that make them go wonky.

    

Once you have them all trimmed up, it’s time to figure out your layout and stitch them into rows. Remember when I talked about finding the center of your picture earlier? Well this is where those creases come in hand.  I was able to line up the HST’s as I figured out my layout.  What isn’t in the picture is the contrasting sashing. As I explained… it got added after the first picture was taken.

      

From here you can stitch the rows on.  I put the side bars on first before and the top & bottom row.  This brings the top to approximately to 13.5” X  15.0” depending on your seam allowances.

The next thing I wanted to do was to add a 3.5”  sashing for a 3” border. When I originally sewn them on – it just screamed bright white to me.  It was the wrong look and threw off the whole piece.  After looking through all my stash & scraps I was able to find shade the shade that I wanted, so I headed for the kitchen.   Time to do a little tea-dying.  Within 5 minutes from start to finish, I came up the shade that was more pleasing to my eye.

As you can see from the picture above, you can see the end results.  You can see the muslin that I did my Redwork on. On the left is the bright-white fabric as is.  On the left is the same print after it’s tea bath.  The softer color worked better then the original one in this case.

We are now heading towards the finishing line.  Once I got the borders on to the rest of the top, my measurements move out to 19.5” X 21.5”.  I put my walking foot on the machine and went to town.  This was the first time I used it to do some machine quilting. I thought a nice echo pattern was a good choice for this wall hanging. I did 3 lines of white before doing an accent line in red.

It doesn’t show up as I had hoped in the picture, but you can see the one red accent line before I did another 2 lines in the white.  I happened to have a package of wide French folded binding to use on this. From there I placed the pre-made binding on and gave it the 2 lines of stitching to finish the whole thing off.

And there you have it.  Another finished project that you can put into your gift giving box for that special person who loves snowmen.  This is a great example of how a simple picture done in an outline stitch and those 2.5” mini charms can work together.  Everything that I used in this project was made with items in my stash.  Even the batting was pieced to fit the project.

I look forward to see your Redwork pieces.  And remember just because the name says “Redwork”, it doesn’t have to be done in red.  There is other colors to play with. This one would look great in Blue Redwork or even in Black Redwork. 

Until next month…

Toodles,
Tricia