Watercolor Seahorse Runaround

I finally finished the Seahorse Runaround bag late Friday evening -and carried it to the shower on Saturday. The mommy to be LOVES the design - and can't wait to see the quilt - and the bag managed to stay on my shoulder the entire time.

I still need to add the zipper embellishment - but have not found a chance to sneak up to the attic and muck around in my beads and charms recently. The zipper was a "freecycle" find that was the PERFECT color!!! I could not have matched that better if I had tried!

This is a fun way to really embellish this pattern, but there are a couple of things to note if you want to try this yourself.

1. The watercolor technique really shrinks up the design, so be sure you take that into consideration when you cut your interfacing to start with. Measure a few times -then cut. You also need to take into consideration the bulk created by all those seam allowances and interfacing - it also takes away from the overall dimensions. This bag is about 2 inches narrower than a regular Runaround bag due to a measurement oops on my part- and it makes it much harder to get your hand to the bottom. It is also longer - which was intentional -but compounds the "bottom of the bag" issue. If I had to do it again, I would start out planning at least an extra inch in finished width over the original pattern.

2. Even with sewing on the grid lines, the whole project has a tendency to twist, so take it slow and easy and try to pin at least a bit to help keep things square.

3. Because of the twisting, DON'T run your main design too close to the edge rows - you will probably lose some of it... I did. The poor seahorse lost his tail a bit!

4. Also because of the bulk, DON'T plan on putting watercolor panel to watercolor panel and stitching. Your machine won't like you, and you won't like having to turn it. It's doable - but not something I would do again.

...that's all I can recall at this time.

Have a few more of these planned - so look for more to come.

Leftovers

Well the seahorse quilt is still a work in progress - I ran out of some of the blues to finish up the water, so need to visit the fabric store to restock before I can go any further (the store in Buffalo did not have the fabrics I needed)

So in the meantime, I decided to play with the scraps of interfacing, leftover orange pieces, and some of the extra blues. I am making a modified Lazy Girl Runaround Bag out of this piece, and will use all the other leftover orange bits to do the top front. This "seahorse" was done totally freehand, without looking back at my pattern. I think he turned out pretty good.

This block is approximately 8 inches wide and 10 inches long. It needs a bit of trimming and good pressing to square it back up a bit.

It was a good warm up for assembling the quilt panel and also gave me a good idea of how much bulk I will be dealing with behind the big seahorse so I can be figuring out how to finish it.

Boy those squares get REALLY tiny!!! Each little square you see here is 1/2 inch across!!!

Oh - and this bag is all for ME ME ME!!! This way I have something to keep after I give the quilt away.

This quilt brought me to my knees...

I am working on my first ever watercolor quilt - fusing 1" squares of fabric to a fusible gridded interfacing, then stitching along the grid to form a mosaic design. It is still a work in progress, but I thought I would share how I spent 4 hours yesterday, mostly on my knees.

I started with an image I found online, and through various manipulations I turned it into a mosaic pattern (tutorial to follow on this someday - I hope). The general gist of it is a seahorse in a bed of seaweed underwater. This will be the center panel of a baby quilt for a mommy who loves seahorses.

I used the printout first as a fabric buying and cutting guide, and then primarily as a guide to assembling the seahorse - once I had that in place I got a little more freewheeling with the seaweed and water squares.

I started out by unrolling the interfacing on the kitchen floor (and yes, I have way more than enough, but there is another project planned for the remnant). The bottle of sunscreen is anchoring the interfacing where it ran in front of the heat vent since it was blowing things all around. I did have some trouble seeing the grids because they were light brown on a brown floor, so I added a piece of paper under the area I wanted to work on to help.

I slid my pressing mat under the interfacing, adding a few placemats under that to catch the heat and steam, and started fusing things in place right on the kitchen floor (the floor was clean - my in laws had visited the day before!) Once I was able to get up and around the seahorse itself to get it fused down, I decided to move the entire operation to the ironing board.

Unfortunately, even with the estimates provided by the pattern I came up short on my fabrics and right now the top of the seahorse is barely under water. I need a trip to the fabric store to get just a few more inches of the blues, and to determine my borders, backing and bindings.

The baby shower is May 10th - don't think I am going to make it - but I may surprise myself.