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.

WIP on Maria Makes A Mess

WIP: Halloween spoopy quilt, update 1

WIP: Halloween quilty thing