Where Jane Creates: Possum Magic

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Possum Magic Round One

As you may know, I'm involved in Plum and June's fabulous Let's Get Acquainted Blog Hop (I'll be posting next week for the final round of the hop).

Today is the third round, and I encourage you to go and visit all the amazing bloggers who will be wowing us with their quilts and quilting stories today. The full linky list is at the bottom of this post.

I'm most excited that my fellow Possum Magic girls Jo and Wendy will be posting today. While everything to come out of this blog hop has been fantastic, I am most excited to have met my new Possum Magic friends through it.

We've all finished our first round of Possum Magic, and Alice wrote a great post featuring all our centre blocks. Go check out our awesomeness, I'll wait...

I received Carla's amazing leaf block in the mail the other week and the pressure was ON to add to it. I had a plan A before I actually saw the block... and thankfully that worked because there was no plan B.

I loved the greens and low volumes Carla used in the centre block, so I decided to stick with that colour scheme for now. I wanted to give the impression of something fading out, like a leaf dying, so I actually stitched five borders to get that effect.

The first border used a scrap Carla had provided from the original block - we decided we'd add scraps with each round to bring some cohesiveness to the entire quilt top. I used this green to bring the block up to 16 inches, and I also used some of the dot fabrics Carla included in my mix of low volumes.

For borders two through five, I decreased the amount of green in each border until I got to an all low-volume border.

I think it looks effective... gosh I hope she likes it!!

Don't forget to pop round and say hi to my Let's Get Acquainted buddies!

Sarah @ Berry Barn Designs

Liz @ Green Cheese Quilting

Janet @ Simply Pieced

Ruth @ Charly & Ben's Crafty Corner

Kristyn @ Melon Patch Quilts

Jo @ Riddle and Whimsy

Linh @ Calling All Stitchers

Alida @ Tweety Loves Quilting

Rachel @ Quiltineering

Shauna @ Shauna's World

Pam @ Sewing Wilde

Wendy @ Wendy's Quilts and More

Jan @ The Colorful Fabriholic

Carole @ From My Carolina Home

Lin @ Lin's Quilts

Helga @ Green Mill Vintage

Kate @ Thread Everywhere

Cheryl @ Texas Quilting Gal

Jenn @ Sew Crafty Jenn

Heather @ QA Creations

Cornelia @ Pieced With Love XOXO

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Possum Magic

Sometimes there are opportunities too good to pass up.

Despite all my intentions to stick with the one quilting bee I know and love (my super awesome girls in my paper piecing bee Wombat Stew), when the idea of a round robin quilt bee was first mentioned on the Let's Get Acquainted blog hop group, my interest piqued. I adore medallion quilts and I have seen all those pictures of the super amazing travelling quilts floating around blog land. If there was one quilt bee I wanted in on, it was a modern round robin.

Then, some of the girls from Australia and New Zealand got chatting about doing a regional bee (to keep postage and shipping times down) and I was in.

Funnily enough, when we talking about names, Wendy suggested Possums as they are a native animal in Australia and New Zealand. I found humour in that as my other bee features another Australian native, the Wombat.

For those of you not up with classic Australian picture books, Wombat Stew and Possum Magic are two of the best loved picture books in Australia. As a preschool educator, I know both these books inside out and upside down. So when Jo suggested we name our bee Possum Magic, I was secretly a bit excited that both my bees have that connection.

And the other Possums have talked about the Magic we'll be creating with our bee, but I also want to mention that in Possum Magic, the possums travel all around Australia - so very appropriate for our travelling quilts!

We have absolute free reign on our centre blocks, but it was a bit high pressure to pick a block worthy of being the centre of a medallion that also set the tone for an entire quilt. I have been drooling over Flying Geese patterns lately, so it seemed the perfect opportunity to try out a complex Flying Geese block. I used this paper piecing pattern called Homeward Bound but I added the border. To make the border I simply cut extra Straight Geese templates and stuck them together into a 10 goose high stack. This brought the block up from 12 inches to 18 inches.

FYI: When following the cutting directions for this pattern, make super sure you're cutting the squares into triangles correctly. I spent the whole time piecing this thinking that the background pieces were very scant and then wondering why I had so many left over.... turns out I cut them on the diagonal twice when I was meant to cut them on the diagonal once. Duh! Go ahead, laugh at me... I am!

I want to stretch myself with this project, so I decided to switch up my colour choices a little. I started with a much larger fabric pull of quite saturated prints. I ditched most of these and pared it down to a few colours when I decided to go for a dark red shot cotton for the background. It was a creative stretch, but I think I pulled it off.

This block literally took hours, but I am so pleased with the end result. I am eagerly sending it over ocean to New Zealand to have the Kiwi contingent work their magic first.

Along with the quilt block I am sending a few scraps (including all those shot cotton hsts I have left over!) from my block. We have decided this is a nice way to build some cohesiveness with the borders to include bits from previous borders.

I've also made a signature block for everyone to sign - or since Apple doesn't approve of the word 'siggy', it's a 'soggy' block.... appropriate given its raining on the east and west coasts of Australia and in New Zealand at the moment. I'm putting together a little tutorial on that.