Woops! This quilt would have ideally been finished a month ago. Whatever, I have all of my future Halloween seasons to enjoy this blanket.
The tree is needle-turn appliqued onto a strip-pieced quilt.
I made a variety of… challenging choices when it came to this project. For one, this was a LOT of needle-turning, but I needed the practice.
For another, I chose to do a sort of scribbly pebble quilting which I have never tried before. Something about quilting circles really stuck on me. I think I was thinking about cauldron bubbles…
Anyway the quilting wasn’t perfect and of course it was much more time and thread-consuming than a simple stiple. However, after this quilt came out of the wash I was immediately elated with my efforts.
Ok so making the tree piece was a little tricky. I found a clip-art image of a spooky tree I liked, made a couple of alterations using photo-shopping software, and printed it out as large as I could. Then I drew a one inch grid on top of the image. I wanted my tree to be pretty big so I made a ratio of 1:5 and made each one inch square on my grid equal a 5 inch square on my gigantic pattern paper made out of taped together grocery bags. I think originally I had planned on doing a 1:6inch ratio (hence the numbers on my grid sheet below), but ended up thinking that’d be too big…
Can’t wait to pull this out next year and every year after!
Side note: Just a minute before I took this quilt outside to photograph I realized that I had turned the oven on to cook dinner, but had forgotten to empty the oven of all of the messy kitchen appliances I hid inside in a desperate quick-cleaning attempt. So I melted my rice-cooker steamer basket. C’est la vie when you’re Jenna.
jenna brand 