Frontier Charm – May Blog Hop Ultimate Home Decor Table Topper & Give-away

Decorating our homes with handmade projects adds a very personal touch. Some of us like a more modern style and some favor a more primitive traditional look. In my home I like the warm and welcoming feel of a more primitive traditional look. I would like to share with you a great way to show you how to use batiks and create a traditional primitive style table topper. I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to showcase the new collection “American Frontier” by Kathy Engle designed for Island Batik which will be arriving in your local quilt shops in the coming months.

The American Frontier collection is a beautiful array of golds, blues, reds, and greens.

Most primitive traditional style quilts combine piecing and applique. I thought it would be fun for this Blog Hop to combine two traditional quilt blocks, the snowball and the shoo fly. These two blocks combined together, make a wonderful chain affect. Since my project is a table topper my patches needed to be small to show the detail of the chain design. Each of these blocks are 3″ finished. I also wanted to decorate my table topper with an Americana style border around the outer edge.

Snowball and Shoo Fly Blocks

I selected the Stone Dot Toast fabric as the background fabric – 121917060 for both blocks.

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The rest of the beautiful colors in the collection were used to create the chain effect in the topper. The Shoo Fly block is a simple nine-patch block made from 1″ finished half-square triangles and 1″ finished squares.

The Snowball block is another easy pieced block. The beautiful fabric colors were selected randomly in for the corners. The 1 1/2″ colorful corner square were cut and placed on a 3 1/2″ background square as shown below.

The blocks were sewn together alternating a shoo fly and then a snowball block in each row.

Applique Border

If you are like I am, I have limited time. I wanted to have a lovely applique border but I needed a way to get it done quickly. The AccuQuilt GO! Cutting system made the cutting of the applique so easy. I used the GO! Qube Specialty Set-Serendipity by Edyta Sitar (55783) to cut my applique. The dies I used from the Qube set were the

• GO! Flower Shapes by Edyta Sitar (55744)
• GO! Flower Accents by Edyta Sitar (55745)

I created a piano key style pieced border to fuse the applique shapes to. I selected the golden fabrics from the American Frontier collection. I fused Lite Steam-A-Seam II made by the Warm Company to a variety of batik fabrics from the collection and then cut 4 shapes out at a time using the GO! dies.

The cut shapes were positioned on the outer border in a pleasing arrangement. The edges were finished with a double blanket stitch using Black (#2692) 50wt. Aurifil Thread. I used a Schmetz SUPER Non-Stick Needle for stitching the applique pieces. The needle has a distinctive scarf with the special design of the eye which ensures prevention of skipped stitches.

Finishing

The topper was quilted using a double layer of Heirloom® Premium 80/20 Cotton/Poly Blend batting. Using the double layer will help protect my oak coffee table from spills. The quilt was quilted with 50wt. Auriful Thead.

I hope you enjoy the May Island Batik Blog Hops and all the great projects my fellow Island Batik Ambassadors will be sharing with you.

Give-Away Time!!!!

Now for a great Blog Hop Give-Away. My blog post will be featuring the Cascadia collection designed by Claudia Pfeil. You can enter multiple times. Please leave me a comment for additional ways to win.

Happy Quilting!

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