To-Do-sday: October Banner

I'm behind on getting my mom's October banner done. Quelle suprise! I've been collecting ideas for the last couple/three weeks and by this past weekend I had a plan.

Sixteen inches across is my goal for each banner. Driving to "Apple Country" every year was a family tradition when I was a kid, so a paper-pieced block of apples in a bushel basket will be included. National Book Month seems a great way to subtly poke the political bear by depicting a library shelf of banned books (with a 2" pumpkin as a bookend as a nod to Hallowe'en).

Sunday I created my POF (Pile of Fabrics).

Using the magnetic pin holder as the center of the following clock metaphor: the library shelf fabrics are at 1-3 (most hidden under the white plastic lid of my orange FQ container), at 3-5 are the pumpkin fabrics (so much fabric pulled for two 2" blocks!), at 6-9 are the fabrics for the 2" leaf blocks, and 10-12 contains the bushel basket and apple fabrics (mostly hidden under the paper pattern).

The bottom border of leaves was, initially, going to be eight (sixteen all told) 2" versions of this block:

In order for this to finish at 2", the pieces would have to be incredibly small. I did a proof-of-concept anyway, working up the teeniest HTSs. The though of making a string center and side panels at this size was too much. I briefly considered using a single fabric for the square and rectangles there. I could get one center square and 2 side rectangles from one 2.5" square (several of which I had pulled from my stash).

Imagining the time it would take to complete sixteen of these sent me to my laptop, googling "Maple Leaf quilt block pattern", and by Monday night I was in bed with a new plan for today: a 9-patch version that would finish out at 3" (using some of my 2" squares to create two HTSs that would finish at 1").

And that's what I did for roughly 6 hours at the beginning of this day. Instead of piecing a stem, I stitched down some of my 1/8" ribbon.

This time during pressing I remembered to alternate the seams so everything would nestle and twirl. I'll add a half inch of the blue fabric to both ends to flesh out the strips to the needed 16".

By the time I closed up shop for the day I had both pumpkins done (although the second one is waiting for a leader-ender to get it off the machine) and a start on the bushel basket.

Another look at the selection of apple basket fabrics, in which I remember that I'd intended to use the wingish-green fabric (9 o'clock) as the grass under the basket, not the plain, apple-green fabric I actually used. Easy enough to replace that tomorrow!

I feared I had used up all the wood-grained fabric in my Hubris project, but I was able to find long strips of it in my 1.5" and 2.5" stashes. I'll be using it as the frame of the library shelf block, with a mottled dark for the background (seen in the pumpkin block). The books themselves will be 1" (more or less) strips of light fabrics--don't need a pattern for that! The titles on the spines of the eight books will be penned onto various light fabrics. Unfortunately, there's a plethora of books to choose from, so I went with the titles that had unique fonts or would adapt easily to other treatments (e.g. various pen colors vs background colors).

 

 

I'm having a hard time imagining how much free time I'll have come February next year, when I start to recycle these banners for 2024 and won't be spending weeks planning and creating them! I've no doubt, however, that something will step in and fill that extra time.