Project Quilting 16.4 Diamond Girl

Well? Did that title do to you what it does to me every single time? Give you an earworm? Seals and Crofts’ song from 1973? I may be dating myself but I’m okay with that. That year was a special birthday for me: I became a teenager.  So this current year holds another special birthday, gulp. I'll let you do the math! 

Here is my finished table runner for the fourth challenge of project quilting, which I’ve named Diamond Girl.

The challenge this time was to make a project where the dominant colour is the colour of your birthstone. I am born in April, so my birthstone is a diamond, which is colourless! That caught me for a hot minute. Well, I’m sure many of you, like me, think of white when you think of diamonds, and silver, gold and sparkle, which is why I made a predominantly white runner with silver sparkle in the background fabric.

Diamonds actually can be colours, I learned, such as blue, and even apparently a very rare red one. At first, I was thinking how they do refract the light with pastel colors, such as very soft, pale pinks, greens and yellows. I knew I would make a diamond block and since I have a lot of white and cream strips in my strip boxes and my mission is to use as many as I can in various projects, I knew I would make the diamonds with strips. I love my first blocks that I made, though once I set them up on my design wall, I realized the dominant colour was not white. Would the diamonds pop enough if I put them on a white background?  Well, when I discovered the perfect white background in my stash, white with geometric  shapes in embossed silver, I think the answer to that question is yes. So this turned out to be a very good pivot.

Indoor lighting in my sewing room makes this darker than it is in real life

Do not worry: I intend to make a baby quilt using the first blocks; I already have another four sections done for a diamond block waiting to be put together!

To make the diamond blocks, I made ~6" x 8.5" rectangles with various strips, stacked a background on top, and then cut the pair half on the diagonal and sewed them back together. Each resulting HRT was squared to 5.5" x 7.5". The original ones are 5.5" x 7.25" so I made the starting rectangle 8.5" for my white ones. I think I might write up a tutorial for this project. In no time at all, the runner top was complete. I would estimate the first blocks and these used up a third to a half of my strips, so that is decent.

I sewed 1" finished sashing between the blocks and also as a border. I wish the photo captured the sparkle in the background fabric better. Several of the strips are embossed with gold, such as the cats, which made me smile to include some of them since they’re in my SAHRR project #1. There’s also a gold embossed Cupids fabric in the strips.

I decided to quilt it on Avril so it would go faster. I used Hobbs Thermore batting, wonderful stuff for smaller items with terrific definition despite its thinness.

Dot to dot quilting went in the two outer diamonds

Swirls with hooks went in the background.

The centre diamond got an Angela Walters design but it left a rather large unquilted diamond shape in the centre, so I quilted the same design in miniature inside the (former) open diamond. I love the effect!

Here is the back, which absolutely thrills me as I was able to use this metre of fabric that has been marinating far too long in my stash. It’s Cicely Mary Barker Flower Fairies fabric. Those are sweet peas, and in case you didn’t know it, the sweet pea is my birth month flower! It’s also my favourite flower.

Here is the original centrepiece, a quilt-as-you-go reversible project, (the other side is Christmas) made with that fabric line about 25 years ago.

Those of you following my SAHRR progress might recognize the pink and blue floral strips!

The metre I used on this runner got purchased a few years afterwards when I found it at a quilt shop on one of the guild hops. Like a lot of my stash, I had no project in mind for it, but wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to get a little more of this pretty fabric! Since this runner fit across the width of the fabric, I still have .5 metre left, so I’m percolating ideas as to what to do with it so it doesn’t sit another 20 years on the shelf. Maybe a couple of placemats?

For the binding, I didn't want to use white, and first had thought of a very pale blue, since blue is my favourite colour. I also thought maybe a pale pink would look good, so into my plastic drawers of less than half a yard chunks I went. I found this mosaic glass (think that’s what you’d call it?) fabric that has the perfect soft, pastel colours with silver 'grout'! Unfortunately, all it has left on the selvage of the ⅓ yard I had is the word 'Christmas' so I have no clue what fabric company or line it’s from. It works perfectly with the front as well as the back.

You can see both labels as well as my quilted initials in the corner amongst the

Closeup of my labels. Finally got to use that salt and pepper shakers one! Rather à propos I’d say for a table runner!

I intend this to go on our chocolate brown dining table, in April of course, but it was much brighter in the kitchen today for photos so here it is on our island. Sidenote to those regular readers: way way back in my mind I'd hoped that making this diamond runner would either spark the memory of just where my either sleeping self, or stupid, shaking-out-the-runner-outside self would put my wedding rings... nada.

In the background, you can see several of our plants who, like us, are patiently waiting for spring. Thankfully, we didn’t get near the amount of snow that the rest of southern Ontario got on the weekend, perhaps just 5 cm.

Quilt Stats:

Size: 34.5" x 16.5"
Fabric: scraps in the form of strips; background is Metallic Fusion by 3 wishes fabric

Batting: Hobbs Thermore

Backing: Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairies by Rose & Hubble

Quilted: on Avril, my Handiquilter Avanté: 22 293 stitches

Threads: pieced with Robison Anton cotton on my 1951 Featherweight; quilted with So Fine polyester #401; Bottom Line in the bobbin

This was another fun challenge which I whipped up in just two days! Thank you to Kim and Trish! Now I'm onto this week's SAHRR prompt, quarter log cabin blocks, and working on the pattern for my annual QAL which starts as usual, on my birthday, April 3.

Linking Up

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