Eat Your Way to Interesting Templates

I recently joined Weight Watchers - 9 pounds down, thank you very much - and really, everything about this program is brilliant, and I totally recommend it, except for one teeny little thing: their relatively low-key peddling of processed junk food deserts.

Knowing that their clients grapple with excessive food lust, dangling this stuff in front of us should be beneath this corporation's dignity. I vowed when I joined that I wouldn't fall into the trap....but then, well, heck, they've got the words ICE CREAM and WEIGHT WATCHERS on the same box.  So I caved and bought. I'm only human.

Then, even worse, I ate the first one while sitting at my computer, contrary to all weight loss psychologist advice (I'm supposed to eat isolated at a table, staring at it.) I'm also supposed to eat slowly, but somehow, in an all-too-brief amount of time, I was left with this.

 I stared at it intently. First, because I felt like I could eat seven more.

But then, because I quite liked the graceful shape. It reminded me a bit of Cheryl Lynch's  futuristic quilting template I'd used to make this 'modern' baby quilt, described in a recent post.

Since the wooden stick was at my desk, and my desk is a few feet from my trash basket, requiring exercise to get up and throw things away, I started making tracings/doodles with it on the backs of scrap paper. Like this:

 And this:

I was falling in love with my stick. I decided to turn it into a quilt, and doodled another page expressly for that purpose:

But then I decided I liked my first page better. So I traced that onto white fabric, then sandwiched the fabric with batting and a turquoise fabric backing, and quilted around all the shapes in black thread. Next I filled in the shapes with colored pencils:


Here's the back:

Kinda cool, but needed more. I considered painting the background, but I didn't want to get paint on the black thread outlines. I did some freemotion squiggling in the blank spaces:

A corded edging finished it up. I like it!I'm thinking about bleaching out the shapes on the back. I'm also thinking of stitching the original stick to it. Maybe set it horizontally on top.  

It might also make a nice clutch in which to put an ice cream store gift certificate for someone who is young and/or does not yet need to join Weight Watchers.

If you are interested in having this template as your very own to fool around with (plus a low-point processed junk food ice cream treat), these graceful sticks can be found within Weight Watchers Dark Chocolate Dulce de Leche Bars (and some of their other flavors). 

This experience also made me wonder what other templates I had lying around the house. I looked in our plastic tableware compartment and found these: 

Tracing them has great potential - or, come to think of it, I could simply stitch them to a quilt!

Have you made a quilt from templates found around the house?