Quilt on Maria Makes A Mess

Halloween spoopy quilt complete!

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A warm hello and thank you to the wonderful denizens of Bluesky who use the #quiltsky hashtag. I recently found out about this hashtag’s existence and used it over there, and a really wonderful community of people showed up and supported me when I was in the middle of this little project and GENUINELY considering abandoning it.

But I didn’t - and now I’m happy to say I finished this Halloween quilted table runner.

Here’s how it all went.

Doing some strategizing

After finishing the main blocks, I laid them out on my very, very badly needing vaccuuming floor. Woof, look at all those bits of fabric fuzz, ugh.

Pumpkin offers her editorial opinions and also says “please vaccuum this floor, mother”

In any case, I did my best to ignore that and just get a sense of what might work with what, and grouped the blocks in sets of 4.

Like so. Here are 4 sets of 4. As you can clearly tell at this point, the stripes were not planned out nor were they remotely uniform. I wanted this to be pretty freeform and so it is!

At this point, the hardest work really was behind me. Piecing these striped blocks felt like it took forever, so assembling the blocks is such a breeze in comparison. I think I put the whole thing together in a half hour at this point:

Here it was in progress, where I saw it all together for the first time. And I posted it on Bluesky because genuinely I really DID NOT like how this looked.

My husband also gave it a “WHOA!” and not in a good way. This is a loud, gaudy, tacky thing! I knew it would be but I think the degree to which it is all of those things really surprised me when I put it together. My original intent was to put this on a console table, and that is what I sized it for, but it felt just… way too much. Too Much Hallween Muchiness.

Wonderful folks on #quiltsky said to keep going, and I had a rare moment of good judgement and actually listened to good advice when it was given to me.

And so, I kept going.

I don’t have photos of the next steps so I’ll just go step by step:

I used June Tailor Quilt Basting Spray (use whatever brand you like) to baste the quilt sandwich - the batting and the base layer.

I used some batting scraps I had in storage and whipped them together to make the batting for this, and while I had intended to make the backing fabric thematic - black and orange, Halloweeny - it ends up I didn’t have enough of it! Nope, I hadn’t checked, and had only assumed. 🤦‍♀️ 🤦‍♀️ 🤦‍♀️ ARGHHH

Thankfully I had learned some good quilting basics from my mom, who is a wonderful quilter, and as many people learned to use bedsheets as quilt backing, I similarly had been taught by my mom to use muslin. As a result, I usually have reams of the stuff around - it’s cheap and easy to get, and it’s useful for garment sewing too so…. I thankfully had plenty on hand to back this quilt as well.

I had learned to baste quilts with big basting threads and hand sew the whole thing and whoaaaaa I did not care for that process any time I attempted it. Basting spray for the absolute win, VASTLY prefer using it, and I love that you can still reposition the fabric to correct inevitable mistakes and bunchings.

VIP = Very Important sPray
I can’t remember where or how I got the tip to try Bottom Line quilting thread, but I had some of it, black 60wt 2-ply, and used that to quilt the layers along with a walking foot. (Oh yeah and I got a new sewing machine, heehee 🤭 more on that some other day)

I had never used a walking foot before, combining that with the very-fine strong thread and my awesome new machine… well, it was like seeing in color for the first time after a lifetime of black and white. WHAT an incredible difference that made - it was so much faster and easier than any previous machine quilting I had attempted. In the past it had been so difficult I found hand quilting to be just faster and easier, but certainly that’s not the case anymore!
In two evenings I did some very basic quilting - just along major seams and diagonals - and then after edge-trimming the whole thing, I used some half-inch black binding to finish the whole thing. That binding size was too narrow and it was SUPER annoying to work with, but it’s all I had on hand (leftover from a garment project last year). It did the job.

Once the whole quilt was done, I did the only logical thing and took it outside at dusk to photograph it with some local autumn color in the background. Natural light in the golden hour always makes everything look incredible:

I’m very glad I stuck with this, thanks to the encouragement of #quiltsky truly. Even when I took it back inside at night and put it across my dining table, it didn’t look as bad as I’d feared.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t tasteful or subtle in the slightest. It SCREAMS Halloween, candy, trick-or-treat, gaudiness and all. And that’s what it’s for, so I’d say it’s a win.

Most importantly for me, this is a project I sort-of started in October 2014 after a visit to the Nippori fabric district in Tokyo, and saw a number of adorable Halloween prints made in Japan. I bought a few fat quarters with no idea how I’d ever use them, and then a few years later I took one of them and cut them into strips… and then totally abandoned whatever plans I had, stuffed the strips into a bin and forgot about it until earlier this year. Meanwhile cute Halloween fabrics continued to accumulate in my stash…. please note the use of passive voice there, ahem… and even after this project I still have a few leftover but not very much.

This was a great Halloween fabric stash buster and I’m so very glad it is complete. Feels great to be able to say I picked up a project from over a decade ago and ACTUALLY finished it!

WIP: Halloween spoopy quilt, update 1

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

No one suffers more than the cats when their human is deep in the Quilting Mines. Or so they tell me. Good thing I have made a lot of progress and am getting closer to done on this one.

The wool pressing pad is irresistable to my cats, especially Cookie. Honestly it’s my fault for leaving it out for two seconds.

Thought I’d give a little update on the Halloween quilt project I started a few weeks ago, as I have made some progress.

le sigh

A little relic of the Joann Fabric days in my stash, always makes me a bit sad to come across these. But the best thing to do is to use the fabric. It’s what Joann would have wanted.

I got to work and cut my stash of Halloween fabrics into strips. I probably should have measured carefully. In fact, most advice says yes, I absolutely should have. Maybe I should have done a bit of math to say, hmm, for my target block size, fabric strips need to be X width. That way I will have a fairly consistent amount of strips per block instead of just trying to wing it.

But I did not do that.

Early in the process, Pumpkin was appalled by my loosey-goosey approach. She’s inspecting my work and did not like what she saw.

That said, I kept on going. Thanks to various youtube tutorials, I learned early on that chain piecing the quilt blocks was a smart way to go with this. At first I really didn’t understand how that would save much time, but yes, thank you to the wisdom of others with lots more experience than me, because it absolutely did. At first it’d take a good while to make just one square, and then pretty soon I was making 4 at a time in the same amount of time.

The other thing that helped speed things up a bit was using sew-in interfacing to hold the whole block together. I wouldn’t use this for a quilt that I’d use as a bedspread but for just something I’m using as a tablecloth, it’s fine.

Soon enough I had a whole stack of blocks. I’m not done yet but I’m very close to putting it all together. It’s going to be tacky and chaotic when it’s all put together. Perfect for Halloween!

Speaking of chaos, my husband took this photo of me teaching my daughter some sewing basics and you can see my sewing table just…. a complete explosion of mess right now. It’s ridiculous.

I know some sewists work in meticulous sewing rooms or whatnot, and I’m sure that’s because they are very neat and tidy people in general. I am not one of those people.

In any case, Pumpkin says despite my messy start, and probably a lot of choices I’m going to regret as I piece it all together, the seams have hid a number of my sewing sins and here’s hoping we’ll all be none the wiser once it’s all done. Maybe it’ll even be done in time for Halloween this year. Hooray?

WIP: Halloween quilty thing

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The temperatures are dropping around here and it’s feeling crisp and chilly. And I live in Massachusetts, home of Salem and all things spooky, so of course my mind is turning to Halloween.

I’ve had plans and stashed fabric for ages for Halloween quilts. The idea started in 2014 on a trip to Japan in mid-October. I saw how Halloween is interpreted in modern Japanese pop culture and I loved it - it was cute and just a little spooky, but nothing gory or creepy. Spoopy, I guess. That’s my jam, and this version of Halloween isn’t one I can easily find in the US for Halloween.

So I loaded up! During some fabric shopping on that trip (there’s a neighborhood in Tokyo that specializes in fabric - I’ll write more about it sometime) I picked up some fat quarters of adorable Halloween fabric and hoped one day I’d have enough to make something with it all.

12 years later here I am… I carefully picked out some Halloween fabrics over the years that I found mainly at Joanns (RIP now and forever) and figured it was time to figure out what went with what. A simple scrappy quilt using strips (a strip quilt? sounds saucy) is what I’m thinking of, so time to get out the rotary cutter, put on some good tunes and get to work on what I am calling my “yes pile”:

The Yes Pile of fabrics for this Halloween scrappy quilt

As you can see, right now everything is pretty saturated in colors, lots of bold graphic design, cartoony and cute.

Hmmm….I am a little concerned that things seem all very high-key, uniform in value. I’ll see if I can can add some variance there, otherwise it’s going to be just very == AHHHHH == all the time. Value contrast is so important!

Also important is looking at fabric choices in different light, literally. I picked this pile out from my stash late at night and it all looked fine enough, and now that I look at them again in the light of day, slightly different story. So fascinating how this all works.

Here are my “laters”, or I guess, the reject pile: The laters, they didn’t make the cut this time

I didn’t like the ones in this pile because the art style was WILDLY different, and as an illustrator that bugs me. Instead of bold graphic style with flat coloring, there’s a lot of shading and variance here, and mixing the two styles together drives me batty (Halloween pun absolutely intended). But maybe there are some pieces here or there I can make work, especially if they are lower in value.

Then again, I could be Overthinking It(TM), as I am wont to do. This is a Halloween project, and the quilt I am pretty sure will be for a table covering and not for actual sleep-bed-covering use.