Stress Relief with Confetti Valentines and Non-Valentines

 I was minding my own business, making a whole lot of improv triangle kaleidoscopes, like this.

I'm only using solids for this quilt. The smallest scraps were filling my "toss" bin.

But then the Create Whimsy newsletter arrived in my email. Lynn Woll, its curator extraordinare, had an article titled "Scrap Happy Confetti Quilts," with  Valentine's Day projects. Oooooo! It looked like so much fun...and I knew I had loads of fresh scraps. 

I plucked the solids from my "discard" bin and sent them into plastic bags, organized by color. 

Then I cut out a 4" square of fusible mid-weight interfacing (Pellon 809/Decor Bond), and started placing bits on them. Lynn suggests laying out squares of interfacing, fusible-side up, then adding a layer of mini-squares, working inward from the borders. That was too slow for me. I used lots of bigger shapes. A top of layer of tulle, to hold everything in place, is an option. I liked the way it looked with a square of purple tulle from my stash. The last step was machine stitching a grid.

That was good practice for the next one, more of an attempted Valentine. 

The blue is a batik, the orange piece on the far left is a tiny print; the rest are solids. I placed white tulle on top, which cut the intensity. I think this piece sends the message, "Although I love you, while wearing pink I was in a bloody duel with golden swords, and now my heart is sore and broken."  In other words, I can't think of anyone I actually want to send this particular (inaccurate) emotion to. (My clever friend Jane suggested it might work as a remembrance of the romantic Valentine's Day massacre.)

For my third try, I went for a design that's tough to ruin: Tree. I accidentally laid the 4" interfacing square down upside-down, so NONE of these pieces were secure! 

I didn't want to move them all to a different piece of interfacing, with fusible facing correctly up; so I just left it like that. I fused one more layer of Decor Bond to back. The extra layer turned out to be helpful for stabilizing the piece during stitching. 

Still, nothing was glued in place, so I had  to cover this one with tulle, too. First I tested white tulle. 

Too pale. So I switched it out to the leftover purple tulle. Much better, richer color.

(The moral of the story: Test different tulle colors.)

Instead of a grid, I did some contour quilting, switching thread colors for different areas.

(Note: the bottom red stripe is a piece of an antique kimono that happened to be on my work surface left over from a different project!)

I trimmed it to a slightly smaller square. But there were still blank spots (where I accidentally left white/interfacing showing) around the edges. So I trimmed even more, cutting curves. 

Finally, I edged it with variegated threads.  

Here's the back. In hindsight, I should have put a layer of fabric on the back before the stitching.

Then I realized that it was shaped exactly like toast. And what could be more romantic for Valentine's day than a scrappy toast-shaped tree scene? (That's a rhetorical question.)

More fun with tulle, trees, and love are in this blog post. Click on the words "Valentine's Day," and/or "tulle" in the word cloud on the lower right for even more.

Find the Create Whimsy article here. Please sign up for my newsletter, too, here. Lots of big news is coming soon!