Thistle Farm #3 - Tumbling Along

KT Winners

Due to technical difficulties last week, I'm announcing winners for two weeks today. Thanks to everyone for your patience.

Congratulations to the winner of our KT Thistle Farm charm pack:
Marie Chat -What a cute and creative pattern using your new Thistle fabric line. Looking forward to the Moda Blockhead project. The name reminds me of my childhood and my brothers!

And, to the winner of the Thistle Farm booklet:

 jane nj/wi -Your thistles are much gentler than the ones I had to pull as a kid in our pastures. Clever and fun piecing.

Thistle Farm

The wait begins. My Thistle Farm fabric collection is due to arrive in March. That means the cute young guy in the brown shorts from UPS could be bringing us a truck load of boxes anytime between now and March 31st. (I'm hoping for sooner than later.) Funny, he never looks as happy as we are while he's unloading all of those boxes. Hmmmmm....

Since Thistle Farm is our spring group, it includes the ever popular KT plum/purple we receive so many requests for each year. Yum!

I've shared the thistle-inspired projects over the past couple of weeks. Now I'd like to show you the block that inspired the thistle block - a layered patchwork version of a tumbler.

Here's the front of a strip of tumbler blocks showing the layered & topstitched triangles on adjoining squares. I first laid out a red square, blue rectangle, gold square, tan rectangle, green square in a row. Next, I laid matching triangles cut from a rectangle, similar to last weeks thistle tops, on the squares next to to it. A little glue, a little topstitching, and we're in business.

(The ivory pieces in the dish are thread winders)

Here's the back, showing how easy it is to sew a strip together with simple squares and rectangles. No stitching on bias edges so your rows are perfectly straight. Tah-dah!

Cut squares, rectangles and triangles from a couple Layer Cakes for variety, add a border, and you have our Cup 'O Charm lap quilt. (Grandaughter Delainey didn't know what a tumbler was, so we named it "cup" - duh, Gramma.)

Cup 'O Charm from Thistle Farm booklet

 Need a faster project? A couple charm packs make a nice sized runner by simply turning the triangles. We used 2 Thistle Farm charm packs for this runner, but charms from 2 different fabric lines makes it scrappier.

Tumbler Runner from Thistle Farm

With all this topstitching, what kind of thread should you use? My tan go-to color is Aurifil #2326 for most piecing and my bobbin. My favorite for topstitching is Aurifil 50wt. color #5013 green/gray. It blends with virtually all KT colors so you don't have to switch up threads on a scrappy project. To make it really easy for you to try it out, check out our March Special.

KT March Special

With the new Thistle Farm projects, I used a variety of colors to stitch the different colors of thistle tops, leaves and tumblers - purple, red, gold, green. The best to buy this selection is in my KT Aurifil Thread Box of 10 colors to match KT fabrics. A 220yd. spool of 50wt. Aurifil is regularly $5 - and a good value at that. This month, our Aurifil 220yd. spools are only $3.50 each and the KT box of 10 different colors is only $30! That's a savings of $20 off suggested retail. Wow! Now is the time to stock up before the Moda Blockheads BOW begins.

Box of 10 Aurifil 220yd. spools - $30

10 single 220yd. spools - $3.50 each

Comment this week to win an assortment of (4) spools of Aurifil thread - tan, green, red, purple. If you order before March 1st, our KT Templates are still 25% off for the February Special - score!

Moda Blockheads BOW

It's not too late to order a KT Starter Pack for the BOW beginning Wednesday, March 8th. I'll be blogging on Wednesdays now instead of Mondays to eliminate confusion about when the blocks will be posted. See you then!