Bloomerie Scrap Challenge Entry

Greeting from Silent Valley Campgrounds, Banning CA!

My husband and I took a few days off to go camping with his mom to celebrate her 63rd birthday, so that's where I've been for the past few days.  I had to jump online today though to share my completed entry for the Bloomerie Scrap Challenge hosted by Rachel of Stitched in Color and sponsored by Bloomerie Fabrics.

I received the stack of 7 fat sixteenths of fabric from Bloomerie a little over a week ago but couldn't decide what to do with them until the day before we were supposed to leave to go camping.  When I first heard that I had been selected as one of the 4 contestants I thought I'd make a wallet but decided against it.  Then I thought I'd make a cool quilt block and use it to make a pillow or a notebook cover, but I didn't really like that idea so I scrapped it. 

Then I got the idea to make a wall hanging to go in my sewing room.  I've never made anything to go in my sewing room and the thought of making something that was 100% just for me was appealing, so that's what I went with.  For some reason as soon as I decided to make a wall hanging the words "SEW. QUILT. LOVE." came to mind so I decided that a paper pieced wall hanging with those words would be the perfect way to use my scraps.  I used the refrigerator magnet pattern from Elizabeth at Oh! Fransson for the pieced lettering and made my own pattern for the spools of thread.

We were allowed to add one additional fabric so I chose Kona Ash.  It's very versatile and I thought it looked great with the cool summery colors of the bundle Bloomerie sent me.  I was lucky and had a large piece of Kona Asparagus left over from a different project and that just happened to be the same solid green that was included in the bundle and so I used it for the backing.

In addition to adding one more fabric to the bundle we were allowed to use as many trims or embellishments we wanted, so I used some silvery-white perle cotton embroidery thread and hand quilted around the word "QUILT." to make it stand out from the other words.  I had originally thought to hand quilt around all the letters but once I saw how busy it made the wall hanging look I decided to stop at quilting around "QUILT." (plus it just makes sense to quilt "QUILT.").

I managed to get all the paper piecing done before I left for my camping trip but the binding and quilting I did while camping.  I discovered that it's not as easy as I thought to keep a project clean while roughing it outdoors.  Luckily for me my MIL is also a sewist and has an iron and ironing board with her on this trip so I was able to wash the finished wall hanging in a tub, line dry it in the sun, an then iron it so it looked pristine again before taking photos.

I'll definitely take more photos of the wall hanging once it's in its rightful place hanging on the wall in my sewing room.  For now though I hope you like the few photos I was able to snap of it on my little point and shoot.  I'll be back to civilization in a few days so hopefully you'll hear more from me then!

-Stephanie