Elementz Blog Hop

Swan Amity Studios

Good morning Blog Hoppers and welcome to Swan Amity Studios and my beautiful Sonoran Desert in Southern Arizona! I am so pleased and proud to be joining you today to talk about the absolutely gorgeous fabric line from Island Batik and Tammy Silvers, Elementz. Read to the end to find out how to win free patterns inspired by this fabric line!

Elementz is a powerful line of bright, bold fabrics that draw the eye in and lend themselves so well to a variety of patterns and background colors. I have had so much fun working with them. Today we’re going to be walking through a fabulous little project you can make with your scraps (or make a bunch of them with your 2 ½” precuts)! The only hard part will be narrowing down which fabrics you want to use, they are all too pretty!

Materials for your pin cushion:

60º ruler from Creative Grids

Small button of your choice (optional)

Two 6” squares of lining fabric

Needle and thread

Stuffing material (I used crushed walnuts to help keep pins sharp)

Making a hexagon pin cushion:

I chose 6 of my favorite fabrics for the top of my pin cushion and two for the bottom.

To cut out your equilateral triangles, start with a strip of 2 ½” fabric and line up your ruler so that the butted end of the ruler is on the edge of the fabric and cut on both sides of the ruler. Turn the ruler to each point of the triangle and trim the points to be butted like the one at the top. This will help to make stitching easy and will eliminate the need to trim any excess later.

Cut 6 triangles (one of each top color) for the top and 6 triangles (3 of each bottom color) for the bottom.

You will begin by stitching your pieces together to form half hexagons. Lay out your pieces in the order you like best and stitch together two pieces from each side using a ¼” seam allowance. Press toward the left. As you add pieces continue to press toward the left. This will help your pieces to nest as you add one half to the other and give you more perfect points at the center.

When your half hexagons are complete for the bottom and the top of your cushion, nest the two halves together, lining up the points, pin, and stitch together. If you did your nesting job well, your points will come together neatly in the middle.

If you decide to make the stars in my Equity pattern, which are put together similarly, you’ll be paying attention to the same nesting of points at the center of your hexagon.

Now that you have two hexagons put together, you can use them as guides/templates to cut out 2 hexagons from your lining fabric.

Stitch your two lining pieces together, leaving an opening large enough to be able to add your stuffing material. Turn right side out and stuff. Since I was using crushed walnut shells to stuff the lining bag, I used a funnel to make filling the lining bag easier.

Once the bag is well filled with your stuffing of choice, use needle and thread to hand stitch the opening closed with a small whip stitch.

With right sides together, stitch the top and bottom hexagons together, leaving a significant opening to make it easy to slide the stuffing packet into the cushion.

Slide the stuffing packet inside the cushion and using a blind stitch and a matching thread, stitch the opening closed. Add the button, stitching through to the back of the pin cushion and pulling the thread tight to create a subtle tuffeting in the cushion.

Congratulations!

You have made a sweet little pin cushion, small enough to travel with!

Elementz has inspired me to look at making bright and eye catching projects with simple graphic shapes. Here are a couple of the new patterns I put out with this gorgeous fabric.

Equity

Viviani

Both of these quilts have irregular binding corners. If you haven’t tried binding irregular edges yet, there are two videos on my YouTube channel (you can find the links on the video page of my website) that will walk you through the process.

Now my lovely quilty friends, the moment you’ve all been waiting for!

How do you enter to win these two patterns from Swan Amity Studios? It’s so easy! Head on over to my Facebook Page, www.Facebook.com/swanamitystudios, and do two things!

Make sure you’ve like my page.

Comment on the post about this blog!

At the end of the blog hop, we will choose 3 winners at random and send them both Equity and Viviani for free!

We wish you luck!

Thank you for joining me today in the desert! Be sure to keep hopping onto the next wonderful blogs that are lined up for you all week. The list of participants and their links can be found below.