Quilted Patchwork Scarves!

i have a few more valentine's projects in the works, and hopefully i'll be able to post them soon, but for the timing being, i'm excited to be able to post these! one of them was a gift, so i couldn't post it until i got my ass in gear and mailed it. i posted a few teaser shots last month, but the actual mailing part didn't happen until last week... what with my organizational issues and all!

so. this all started with the october VMQG challenge, which i posted about here. perhaps fittingly, since i was so super gung ho about it, i was one of the people who won blocks! huraay!!

i think i was the 3rd or the 4th person to win and choose their blocks, so i ended up with a quite a varied assortment. but i did manage to snag 4 similar blocks made by one of the guild members, Ronda, and i immediately knew that i'd have to think of a fabulous project to use them for.

i decided that a scarf would be the perfect use for them, and went on a search to find fabric to use with them. i really really wanted to find more of the small black and white damask, but i didn't have any luck. (do you know who made it? i can't even find it online, cause i don't know what to search for!)

i ended up with this fun black and white bubble print, and purchased a small piece of a gorgeous purple fleece to be the backing.

i wanted to keep with ronda's design of the visible seams, so when i added the bubble fabric to create the length of the scarf, i sewed them with the seams on the outside.


after i'd sewn the scarf length together, i laid it out, wrong sides together, in the centre of the fleece strip, and pinned it all together. i did a bunch of free motion stitching, with lots of hearts and swirls, straight stitching within the blocks, and then trimmed the fleece to match the cotton after i'd finished.






and this is what i ended up with! i love it!




i did learn a lesson though - even when the fabric won't shrink, it's a good idea to prewash it anyway - see how the purple fleece stained my sewing machine?!


you can really see the difference if you look at where the sticker was!




if you remember the quilts i made for the christmas bureau, you'll remember that i backed 3 or the 4 of them with fleece. i had a small piece of the brown fleece left, and realized that it was the perfect colour for my friend angie.

i dug through my stash, looking for brown prints that had a hint of orange or yellow in them, and pulled out what i found. they were all pretty small pieces, so i took them with me to a few stores, and added two more prints. i really wanted to find colours that matched her awesome hair, which is multiple shades of light brown and gold.



i sewed angie's scarf with the same exposed seams, because i know she likes that look.




because i didn't have the full 60" width of the fleece left, to make a scarf that could be wrapped around a few times, i cut off one end of what i did have, and sewed it back on, leaving a gap in the centre of the seam. when i pieced together the cotton fabrics, i left the same gap. i laid the two pieces on top of each other, matching up the gaps, and topstitched around them, creating a slit in the scarf to slip the other end through.



i did less complicated quilting on angie's, just lines in several different machine stitch patterns, but i still loved how it turned out. after i'd finished the quilting, i trimmed the fleece like i did for mine, and then i decided to zigzag around the edges. i was really happy with how it turned out, and apparently so was she!





oh, and i handstitched a little label on the back, just a machine embroidered "xo, amy".