Follow Your Own Path/Celebrating a Famous Canadian’s Birthday QAL

June is a busy birthday month in my house being that we celebrate birthdays for myself, my oldest son affectionately known as Demando in Blogland, Granddoggie Daisy and for the past five years a Famous Canadian also affectionately known as Sandra’s Father. While the birthdays celebrated for my family involves cake, I celebrate the Famous Canadian’s birthday by participating in the annual QAL hosted by Sandra, mmm quilts.  Since this is a milestone anniversary of celebrating a Famous Canadian’s Birthday I thought I create a collage of the quilts I made in observance of this fun and important QAL. And talk about having ants in her pants waiting for June 15th, the first day of the Linky Party, so I can post about my Follow Your Own Path quilt which was a Finally Finished  for more than a week.

Here is my quilt for this year’s Follow Your Own Path QAL, a theme that, a QAL rebel like myself, could be inspired to go off course. Surprisingly, I behaved myself by sewing somewhat on schedule and did not deviate much from the pattern which I will mention later in this post.

I love participating in Sandra’s QALs; her patterns are fun, quick and easy and I always seem to have just the right fabrics in my stash. I have to confess, though, that this year’s Follow Your Own Path (FYOP) QAL was a challenge to find the right fabrics in my stash. Part of the fun in participating in a QAL is to make the pattern your own and I was having problems because I kept seeing Sandra’s version of the one she made for Modern By The Yard Ezine. I knew that I would have problems finding eight fabrics in four colors with two shades and with the right patterns/scales in my stash.

After several days and hours of pulling out fabrics and coming up with numerous combinations, these are the fabrics I finally decided upon and was resigned to using.  To tell you the truth, I was not in love with this choice, partly because the colors were similar to Sandra’s quilt and I could foresee how this quilt would look. Part of the fun of participating in a QAL is making the quilt your own.

While putting away the piles of fabrics I had pulled in my quest to find the perfect fabric combinations, I passed my bins containing new fabric purchases.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw this fabric neatly folded, tucked under some other fabrics, but enough for me to see that this was the fabric I wanted for my background. I thought I could exert QAL Rebel privilege by using the same black fabric which was going to be my background for the shadow arrows. Combined with using Basic Grey Grunge fabric of which I have a nice colorful collection in my stash, this would work and this combination definitely made my heart sing. Unfortunately I only had a 3/4 yard remnant of this background and I needed more. I purchased this remnant online and the selvedge didn’t show the maker or the name of the fabric line. Thanks to some sleuthing of past online purchases, I was able to determine that it was from Dear Stella and after typing a search for Dear Stella Graffiti fabric I had a name for this fabric line: Pour Some Sugar On Me which I think was inspired by a 1987 song by Def Leppard which may explain why this fabric line had a rock music theme. I was able to purchase yardage of this fabric, on sale, from Hancocks of Paducah.

So, Grunge and Graffiti makes my FYOP quilt and is fitting of my usual QAL Rebel-ness and the theme. On a side note, as for using the same black fabric for the shadows, not being a rebel, because Sandra in her   

April 4th post confirmed that you can use black fabric for all of the shadows which was a “YES or fist pumping moment for me. The only thing that concerned me was that I had to wait several weeks for the fabric delivery which postponed my “follow the schedule” mantra for this QAL. I should mention that I had intended to make the smaller version of FYOP but chose to make the throw size so I could showcase more of the cool fabrics.

Once the fabric was received, cutting the fabric was smooth sailing, thanks to some of the patches were die cut and being able to cut the larger patch sizes with my Stripology ruler. (I should mention there are no affiliate links in this post.)

Like all of Sandra’s previous QAL patterns, these arrow blocks were a snap to make despite having to pay close attention to the arrow orientation. Really these arrows could have been made at one time but someone was following her mantra. Leave it to Sandra, the Shadow Master, so named by Kathleen McMusing, to figure out a shadow can be created with just three patches of fabric. I see from posts on Instagram and on Blogland, there were a lot of participants who finished their quilts early, probably, I think, because the pattern was just that fun and quick to sew.

Once the flimsie was sewn, I decided to add a 2/-1/2” border with the background fabric so some of the shadow arrows would not be next to the binding which was going to be the same fabric as the shadow arrow. This is my only deviation from the pattern.

This black and white paint splatter print by Springs Creative was perfect for the backing and a nice alternative for wanting to preserve the remaining yardage of the background fabric. I found this fabric at Walmart and purchased a whole bolt of it since this print would work so well with some of the modern quilts waiting to be quilted. I found this bolt on the very top shelf which involved some climbing on my part since hubby was shopping elsewhere in the store. If you’ve seen the YouTube video of a huge Monitor Lizard inside a store climbing up a shelf, that’s what I looked like, but not as graceful.

One of the reason why the background fabric is important for me when I do a mmmquilt pattern is that I need it to hide or camouflage my lackluster quilting.  I had wanted to do quadrant quilting but I couldn’t line up the arrow points with the quilting lines so I did horizontal straight line quilting, 3/4” apart.  Inspired by the Follow Your Own Path theme, my quilting lines were not always straight, sometimes I couldn’t see the guide lines, especially on the background fabric and were in some places, downright wonky. I used an Essential Thread in gray for the machine quilting. FYOP measures 58”x64”.

Kathleen McMusing already posted her FYOP quilt last month and threw the gauntlet down as to finding a cool place to photograph your quilt. Knowing of some of the other participants in this QAL, like Diann who lives near a sculpture park and Wendysota (Wendy from Minnesota) who wouldn’t surprise me if she captured a Bear to hold up her quilt, I created a collage of where my FYOP quilt would look great thanks to some photo dropping via PicMonkey.

This one is my favorite taken when we were visiting South Carolina several years ago.

After hanging around all of these photos, my FYOP quilt deserves a rest on the porch steps at the Grandparent house. I’m not sure of this quilt’s final resting stop but I did offer it to Demando to hang in his bedroom since it would go well with the other graphic art he has hanging around but he declined. Surprisingly, he does not like the background. Demando did mentioned, though, that he would like a new quilt for his bed, the nerve.

Again, for the fifth year in a row, I would like to thank Sandra for designing this wonderful pattern and hosting, as usual, a fun QAL, “ton père strait fier”. Be sure to check out the Linky Party to see the other FYOP quilts and don’t be surprised if you see a Bear holding up Wendy’s quilt. As for suggesting future QALs like I’ve done in previous posts, I thought I mention that I would not have a problem with using my graffiti background fabric again. Also, still hoping for Bella to be one of the prizes.

Linking up with MMMquilts Celebrating a Famous Canadian’s Birthday Linky Party