Friendship Medallion Part 5 & 6

Another round on the Friendship Medallion quilt.  I'm loving it!

This is my completed Swoon quilt top.  Now on to the quilting.

 Here are some close-ups of the blocks.

Part 4 of Friendship Medallion

This is Part 4 of the Friendship Medallion quilt.  I'm really loving it.  I am using fabrics from my stash and have only added a couple new fat quarters to it.

Now on to Part 5!

This is the inner block of a Friendship Medallion quilt that I am working on.  It's a free pattern from Patchwork Pumpkin.  It's designed to make you use up your scraps and not buy new fabric.  They will send you one round  and then you have to send them a picture of the finished section to get the next part.   I'm loving it.


 You can get the pattern at Patchwork Pumpkin from Australia.  I can't get the link to work so just go to patchworkpumpkin.com.au  

 I am working on the Sue Spargo BOM for 2011 (I haven't started 2012 yet, but it looks wonderful) and I was really having a hard time getting the cotton appliqued onto the wool and having it come out as nice as I want it to be.

Since I'm used to the back-basting method of applique I was having a heck of a time figuring out how to get the pattern on there, since you can't put wool on a light box and trace around a pattern.

I first drew the pattern onto freezer paper and cut it out.  Then I pressed it onto the cotton fabric, which was pinned to the wool background.  Then I stitched around the freezer paper with floss, same as I would have done with back-basting it from the back.  I just "front-basted" it.

Then I removed the freezer paper, and trimmed 1/4" (or less) around the stitching, just as I would have done with back-basting.  

I don't know if these pictures are in exact order, but I'm sure you get the idea.  Now I just had to applique those pieces and then cut the wool behind them to the right size.  It worked great and I've already used this method on something else I was working on.

Thought I'd show you a problem that I was having trying to make some bias stems for a few leaf blocks.  I top-stitched the stem across the square and then I needed to square it up.

 Here is where it jammed in the sewing machine and got all twisted.  I kept thinking that there has to be a much easier way to do this, so this is what I came up with.

I sewed a long strip of the straight-of-grain stem across a larger square (corner to corner on the bias).

Then I cut the squares out of that piece of fabric.  Trimmed from one side, turned, and then trimmed the other side to get the size I needed.  It worked great.  Frustrations over!