Little Bitty Batty

This week's time in the sewing room started with a few hours of fabric pressing and folding.  A growing pile of prewashed stuff had teetered on the back of an office chair for a couple months, threatening to tumble onto the floor.  It was time to deal with it.

One good thing about the job was getting reacquainted with the stash.  I definitely have some whatever am I going to do with that? pieces.  I'm okay with it; in fact, I find it a fun challenge.  One item was a sort of creepy purple-gray, black, and white print I'd bought on vacation in July (found in the clearance bin, no big surprise).  Then there were the mottled burnt orange and poison green pieces.  Ah, yes, this could be the makings of something spooky and seasonal.

As it happened, I'd found a wicked cute bat applique PDF a few days ago (here).  Instead of putting it on a single fabric background, though, I thought I'd try a string or strip-pieced one.

So I made a strata of strips.  Then I cut four squares by turning my 6.5-inch square ruler so the middle strip would be along the diagonal, like so.

Here they are laid out on the cutting table prior to sewing.  I traced the bat onto freezer paper.

Then I layered four pieces of black print fabric, pressed the freezer paper bat onto the top layer, and carefully cut all four bats out at once, following the pattern.

In hindsight, since the bats were going to be fused onto the background, I should have ironed the fusible web onto the black fabric first.  But I didn't, so there was some more fussy cutting of bat shapes from fusible.

The bitty bats were then fused and machine appliqued around the edges.  Then it was sandwiched and quilted.  It's about 12 inches square, table mat size. 

I have, in the past, had a problem quilting through fusible (and I haven't tried another brand yet, which I intend to).  So the best course was to avoid quilting the bats and just concentrate on the center and outer portions of the mini.

I winged it on the center quilting, just following the lines where the four pieces joined and waving back and forth over the line, east to west, then in reverse to make oval shapes.  Then the same thing, north to south.  That didn't seem like enough quilting, so I did double-size waves east to west and north to south and back again, making double-size ovals.

I did concentric circles in the outside with a walking foot, since the bat wings created such a cool circular shape, and I was thinking of bat sonar too.

Isn't it interesting that the bats are sort of an illusion that you don't necessarily see immediately.  You might notice the center first, and then those curious things that look like green fangs around the outside.  And then...bats!

So that's my creepy-cool little bitty batty mini quilt!