X Marks the Spot Finished

I had to take a break from my very fun Harry Potter quilt to finish the X Marks the Spot quilt which is a wedding present for Joe and Braden this Saturday!  Talk about cutting it close!  But I finished quilting it, and the binding went on like a charm, so it's done!  And beautiful!  Here it is:

I did a lot more quilting in the borders, particularly the last border, than I normally do.  I still used matching thread, so I am not quite as confident in my abilities yet.  Getting there though!  Only four fabrics were used in making this quilt, 5 if you count the backing, that is a little unusual for me too.  Still there is a very nice pattern in this simplistic design.  I hope Joe and Braden will like it!

Spider

I wanted to put a spider on top of the bookcase.  I searched high and low for a paper pieced spider.  I did find a tarantula, but it wasn't what I wanted.  The legs were spread out around it, and I need all the legs pointing down, onto the bookcase.  So what's a girl to do?    I designed my OWN spider pattern, and I am in the process of paper piecing it!  Perhaps I made it a little too complicated...  It's VERY  hard to align all these spider legs, they are so skinny!  I have to pin everything about a half inch apart before I sew.  A HAIR OFF and it looks out of whack so fast!  My seam ripper is my new best friend!  Here's a picture of my progress:

I have the body done.  It was 5 main sections, and some of the sections had sections too!  The "eye" section had 4 parts.  YIKES!  These legs though, they're gonna be a real challenge...

Serpent

I have been working on the border for my bookcase, and I found a really cool serpent pattern at Sewhooked.com.   It measures 5 1/2  x 15".  I bought the pattern, and made the serpent. But I wanted a 4 inch border.  So I shrunk the pattern down by 80%.  Now it will fit a 4 inch border perfectly.  I also wanted the snake to be longer than the pattern, and so the fun began.  I actually designed my own paper-pieced sections.  A lot of this was trial and error, and I had to re-design a piece along the way, breaking it into 2 sections to get the desired curve.  I added 6 new sections in all.  It took me all day! My serpent measures  4 1/2 x 22 1/2.
Here is my serpent and the original version:

My Version

Original

I pinned my serpent next to my Harry Potter quilt, and it seems to be "floating" in mid air.  Hmmmm.  I actually wanted to have the serpent appear to be crawling up the bookcase.  If I go with a 3" border, I could trim the right side of the serpent to a quarter inch from the snake so that after I sew it, it would touch the side of the fabric.  The problem is, the head of the snake is already at the seamline, 1/4" from the edge.  I have studied this problem and have come up with a solution!  (of course!)  If I undo the first section of the snake right under the head, I could trim the rest to a quarter inch.  I could add the head to the top border so it would be overlooking the bookcase a little bit.  I would have to trim the neck about 1/2" so that the head piece is also 3.5 inches tall.  (Can't have the side borders smaller than the top/bottom borders!)  I think that would work, although, I do like the 4 inch width of the border.  I will be experimenting today!

The Books

Here are some of the books with their titles.

The first is my favorite.  I made the book "invisible" and just put in the title:

Invisible Book

You can see the wood grained fabric I used for the shelves here too.

 

 

Bookcase

I have finished the book titles, and added the wood-grained fabric sashing strips to "build" the bookcase. I had thought this was going to be easy, but it was trickier than I thought.  I measured, five 10" blocks = 50 inches, with 1/4 in for seam allowance on each edge.  So, 50 1/2 inches.  I cut my strips.  But when I sewed them on, they didn't fit -- the sashing strips seemed to short.  I ripped it out, measured again, sewed it again.  Still too short.  Rip it out again.   Grrrrrr.  I ended up marking the centers, the quarters, and the eighths on the strips and quilt, and MAKING THEM FIT!.  At a quilt class I took once, the teacher made that the #1 rule!  "Measure in 3 places, take the average, cut strips exactly that length and MAKE THEM FIT."  After I had all the pins in, I matched them up, and sewed them. They DID fit after all! Whew!  I have done more ripping out in this quilt than any other I have done so far!

 But it was all worth it.  I am very pleased with this project.

Now I need some kind of outer border, and a backing.  For the outer border, I have seen other samples of this quilt that have "feet" on the bookcase bottom, and things like swords pieced into the border.  I'm not sure if I can get that fancy!  but I'll be thinking about it.  (I'm not sure where they got the patterns.)
 I'll be adding pics of more book titles.  Some I took from the list, and some I made up.  Not all the books have titles.  Anyway, here is my finished bookcase.

Book Titles

I have been experimenting with the fonts on my sewing machine.  I only have 3 fonts, so my book titles won't have a lot of variety.  Also, one of the fonts is a cursive script, which is very hard to read.  I probably won't use it.  I have 7 books titled now, 6 are a "set" of travel books, the block with 6 red books:

Notice that one of the books is put in upside down, thus, I had to put the title on the other way.  I might take needle and thread and make the "h's" and "l's" a little taller.  At least the font is read-able, if not too fancy. It'll do.  One sad thing is that when I was snipping threads, I also put a teeny tiny cut in the red fabric.  Just above the capital W in Werewolves.  I treated it with "fray-check" and ironed on a tiny piece of interfacing so it won't "grow", and I am gonna try to camouflage it with thread by making the W a little wider/longer.  Not sure if that will work.  The only other thing to do is dismantle the block and make a new book, which I probably would do, except I used scraps for this, and I don't think there is any of this red fabric left.  I am mad at myself for being so careless!  (Where's the naughty chair?)

Ok, back to work now!

30 Finished Blocks

I have been steadily working, almost non-stop, and I have all 30 blocks done now.  I did a couple of substitutions from the originals, but it all worked out way better than I expected.  Here are the rest of the blocks:

This first one is actually two substitutions, since I skipped block 15, and block 30.  I made a double-block because after I enlarged the wizard (originally a 5 x 5 in size) to 165%, and made a photo frame around it,  it was rather large.  I wanted more space on the sides.  The tri-Wizard cup was enlarged only 125%, and turned out smaller than I expected.  So together, it seemed a perfect solution to put them together, and added a few books and trimmed it to size.  Wonderful!

  

And here they all are!   I have to add sashing strips between the rows.  Before I do that, though, I want to add book titles to some of the books.  So that is my next project.  This is fun!