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March Sister Challenge: Lorene


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March was our first Sister Challenge. When Natalie and I came up the idea for this blog, I thought it would be fun to do some sort of month challenge where we both make something using the same pattern, fabric, theme, etc.  SInce we live 2800 miles apart, it would be interesting to see what we come up with when we have no idea what the other person is doing!

For this first challenge I bought 3 fat quarters of St Patrick’s Day fabric from Fabric Depot. I sent it to Natalie with the challenge to make something awesome by March 17.

My inspiration for this challenge,  were the fabric decorations my mom used to make. She has them for Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Easter, Valentine’s Day…even my hometown Parsippany Day!  I think many were from fabric panels but I know she made some from scratch too.  I can’t really hang anything from my door,  so I decided to make a table topper.

Quilt Sketch

My original concept for my abstract clover mini quilt

I was rather time crunched making this quilt, as I had recently had surgery and then had a snowboarding trip. However I was determined to complete this on time! So as I was cutting my strips I realized that putting my stripes on the diagonal would be much more complex. I decided to simplify this by doing stripes that ran parallel to the edges instead.

Lorene's Modern 4 Leaf Clover Mini Quilt

Lorene’s Modern 4 Leaf Clover Mini Quilt

Other than the stripes, I wanted everything to be very random and freeform. So I just eyeballed it when I cut the angle slices off the stripe blocks. This formed the negative space between each clover leaf. When it came time to quilt I used my walking foot and put some randomly spaced lines radiating from the center of the quilt. This came together very quickly for me. I guess I’m getting better at quilting! My only hiccup was that I used metallic thread and my walking foot to finish my machine binding and it definitely didn’t turn out straight. Oh well!

The final quilt measured around 18″ x 18″ and I finished it right before work on St Patrick’s Day.  In addition to the 3 prints, I used gold and black Kona cottons.

I hope you enjoyed the March Sister Challenge! Be sure to check out Natalie’s awesome Boyle’s Law Mini Quilt!

March Sister Challenge: Natalie


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When Lorene sent me a challenge for St Patrick’s Day, I had no idea what to do. The past month was a busy one… As a trustee of the Asbury Park St. Patrick’s Day Parade, I was busy helping to organize and run the first ever parade on March 9. I even made the prize ribbons and Grand Marshal sash.

Asbury Park St Patricks' Day ParakeI did some searches for Irish themed quilt blocks, but nothing really interested me. For some reason, I the thought popped into my head to do a Fibonacci Spiral… but then I realized Fibonacci isn’t even Irish. So I did a quick search for Irish Scientist and low and behold Robert Boyle, the grandfather of Modern Chemistry, topped the list. He proved the relationship between pressure and volume of gases, a cornerstone of my favorite chemistry topic, The Universal Gas Law.  Who doesn’t love the equation PV=nRT ?

The binding is gold tissue lamé, and it was free-motion quilted on my Singer Stylist.  Making this mini quilt was so much fun,  I hope it inspires others to make educational quilts!

Boyle's Law Quilt

Make sure to check out Lorene’s March Sister Challenge entry!!