San Francisco Stitch Co.: Mad Jack's Halloween Table Topper Part 2

Halloween is now just a week away! The last post left you with a bunch of random pieces for your table topper-- if you are devilishly clever, you may have already finished. The last design in the puzzle is now posted and we'll show the rest of our "mummies" how to "wrap" it up!

First, visit our website to get your final piece--"Happy Halloween." Stitch it and trim it, on point, to 5-1/2" x 5-1/2" as directed in the instructions.

Click Here to Download this Design (Bottom of Website Page)

Read the previous blog post

to make sure you have all of your pieces:

Four 5-1/2" x 5-1/2" machine embroidery designs

One 5-1/2" x 5-1/2" fabric square

Four 5-1/2" x 5-1/2" pieced blocks from the template on the above web page (ours are orange and black)

and

Four 1-1/2" x 16-1/2" checkered border strips

You will also need:

20" x 20" batting

20" x 20" backing

80" of 2-1/2" binding strips

To complete your center block, sew rows of three together following the blue pressing arrows; then sew the rows together following the green arrows. All seams are 1/4." Our embroidery designs are set so that they will be visible all around the table-- you may want to change that if you are making a wall piece.

Presto...

Now get your checkered borders from the previous post...

You'll notice they don't at all fit! No worries.

Pin a strip to the block as shown below. A black square will hang off the left side. Match the raw edges of the brown square (or whatever color your second square is) with the raw edges of the lab jars on the left. Then pin both ends of the strip. You can see our strip was a bit too long and there is a lot of fullness there...

YIKES!

IT'S TIME FOR A TRICK!

Give the checkered strip a good spray of starch-- it will shrink up a bit, or at least get very floppy! Then pat it down into place. PRESS, don't iron, with up and down motion. You have now spread the fullness over the whole length, it is now fitting, and you can add more pins to hold it. Sew a partial 1/4" seam, back tacking at the blue dot and then stitching to the end as shown by the blue line.

Your piece should look as below.

The second strip does not have to hang off the edge, just make sure a black square is in the corner at the left. Use the starch TRICK above if needed and sew it on all the way across.

Continue around with the 3rd and fourth strips... when they are completely sewn on, you can go back and finish that first partial seam.

ABRACADABRA!

Add batting and backing to make a quilt sandwich...

we kept our quilting very simple, just stitching in the ditch around the piecing and adding a big X in the center square. Then trim all layers even.

Make up your binding strips and attach them. We just have no time left this month, so instead of hand stitching the back of the binding, which we really would have enjoyed, we did it entirely by machine. It worked out well enough as you can see by the front and back shown below.

MAGIC!

So all set for Halloween-- we would have liked to do a final picture with our office candy bowl filled, but it is WAY too early to do that in this establishment-- the candy would just not make it to next Tuesday.

Now there are a couple of teasers for you,

but first we need to have a "talk."

We are not going to make a PDF of this...

it is double work, it costs money, and this has been mostly a free project. Yes, change is hard, but the blog allows bigger pictures, and best of all we can have a little conversation and learn from each other. (Paying sets will still have PDFs.)

The good news is, you can make your own. I learned this from Bunnybe (thank you!) when she commented on the last post!

Simply press CTRL-P while you are reading this page. A dialogue box will come up to print the page. You can do that, OR look for where it says "DESTINATION" and "SAVE TO PDF." Follow the prompts and you can save a copy to the folder with the designs in it for later. And that's all I have to say about that!

Back to embroidery...

This is our Creepy, Countdown Calendar!! Almost done! The good news is, we are going to release the last set EARLY so you can have more time to finish and display it on Halloween! Expect it in the next couple of days if you are a subscriber. You will be getting the last three pockets, the large heading "Happy Halloween" for free, with complete instructions to finish up.