Boo To You!

When witches go riding,
and black cats are seen,
the moon laughs and whispers,
‘tis near Halloween.
–Unknown

I couldn't completely give up sewing while Grace is on R and R, so I've been working on a few appliqué projects, one of them being my October kitchen quilt. The darling little pattern for this wall quilt was free at Shop Hop three years ago. The shop owner designed the pattern and cleverly put together kits for it. Halloween + fabrics = no brainer. I bought one. Halloween was only a couple of weeks away though, and since I didn't have a prayer of getting it done in time for Halloween that year, I put the project on hold until the next summer. I prepped all the appliqué at home and took it with me to work on while the Little Bugs were at swimming lessons or gymnastics. Over the last few days I finished up the details on Simon and Felipé {the cats; I'm getting to why there are two} and put together Lou Jean {the witch}. Everything else was a finished two summers ago and has been waiting patiently for me to get back to it {sadly, this is not my oldest UFO}. Since this is part of the kitchen quilts series, I've planned to make place mats {six} to go with the quilt. Each one will have one element from the quilt, plus a Boo {the quilt is called Boo To You!}, and they'll be scrappy and patchy.

Here is a close up of Simon and Felipé. They are identical twins, but Simon's whiskers are just a hair shorter than Felipé's. You can see Simon is on the right.

These are the ghosts, Trevor and Amelia. I'll let you decide which is which.

Here are all the little pumpkins. They don't have names because that would just be silly.

Showing here, bats {I can't keep the bats straight – they all look alike so they're all called Roger, which offends the one that isn't a boy} and candy corn. I have more candy corn ready to be appliquéd, but I've just decided on how I'm going to put the place mats together, so I hesitated on those until I was sure of my plan.

And this is Lou Jean and her little sister Ramona. This was another sticking spot. The background behind Lou Jean took up every last bit of that pretty star fabric that came in the kit. I debated about whether to use it behind Ramona and find something else for Lou Jean so I could have some scraps of it for the borders. In the end, I followed the pattern and used it for Lou Jean's background. It worked out because a friend who is de-stashing sent me some of her cast-offs and one of the pieces is really close to this, so it will work perfectly for Ramona's background and patchwork squares. I love it when a plan comes together.

I have some work left to do on the place mats, but the pieces for the quilt top are ready to assemble as the pattern is written. But I'm making a few adjustments to it, so that means a little more appliqué work before I'm able to get the top finished. I'm going to put a 1" black sashing in between each block and then I'm going add a row of scrapy patched Jack-o-Lanterns across the top and bottom. Since the candy corn and bat block is all one long piece, I may trim the candy corn off the bat and use it in the place mat, and then use another fabric for candy corn in the quilt, just to break it up a bit. The quilt has a scrappy, patchy border of the left-over pieces of fabric, as will the place mats. Which worries me just a bit. I can't plan this out ahead of time, especially with the alterations I'm making to the pattern. I'll just have to work it out as I go, and that really isn't my style. I like to have a plan before I start. This is going to be an adventure.

I checked the web-site for the quilt shop where I got this pattern, but they didn't have it in their store. The shop owner, Rebecca, designed it so if you contact them, I'll bet she could hook you up. Besides being a pattern designer extraordinaire, Rebecca also happens to be amazing at free motion on the long-arm. And I just happen to have a $15 gift certificate for their shop {remember, I won it for my Dragonfly quilt}. When I get this quilt finished I'm going to take it to her and have her quilt it for me. My goal is to have the quilt top finished before Halloween this year. Even if it isn't back from the quilter's in time to display, I'll be ahead for next year.