More Halloween La Passacaglia - and Spoonflower Shop!

Hello everyone,

My Halloween La Passacaglia quilt has been slowly rumbling along in the background, so I thought it would be good to update you all.

As I mentioned in my last update, I was feeling frustrated by the lack of fabric available that suited my specific vision for this quilt. However, I then reasoned that not being able to do everything I wanted was not the same as not being able to do anything I wanted, so I have been doing my best to work with what I already have as much as possible.

So I expanded two rosettes, and made another rosette centre.

And I have been doing several odd-shaped bits from around the edges of the quilt that aren't strictly rosettes, but are needed to fill in some of the unusual shapes created by the pattern.

I found a good orange Egyptian mummy fabric on Spoonflower, that is perfect for one of the larger rosettes.  

For this one, I wanted to highlight a butterfly type shape within the pattern. Although being as this is Halloween themed, I should probably think of it as a moth.

I added these, then eked yet another fussy cut out of my one good white Halloween fabric, and started adding some of the outer stars (which are not fussy cut, and use a blender I have a good quantity of). This rosette is getting so big it is getting difficult to get the detail into photographs. 

But more excitingly, I actually managed to draw a design I was happy enough with to print out from Spoonflower! My original concept for this quilt was a stroll through a graveyard on Halloween, so I really wanted some gravestone fabric, and it just didn't seem to exist anywhere. So I drew this one.

My first attempt looked good, but I got the scale a bit wrong, and the motifs were too big for this quilt. They did, however, fit nicely into a 1.5 inch hexie though, so I will still be able to use them in something. Depending on the themes, they may turn up in the centre of a #focuscuttingsewalong block this year.

So I put together attempt two, with the same design at a reduced scale (this is more difficult to do than I thought it would be, by the way).

And I think it really works! I got a rosette centre using just the sample square.

And the good thing about Spoonflower is that if any of you like this fabric, you can buy it too! The link to my Spoonflower shop is here, and both the medium-scale and the small-scale versions are available in a variety of fabric types. Obviously, it is a pretty macabre design, though. There are a couple of other low-volume, not Halloween designs in my shop as well, that I made mostly to test the process. I get a commission if you do choose to buy. 

I do want to add more designs, but I don't really have enough time or money to mess about with it too much. A couple of other trials I have done haven't worked because of the problem I have mentioned previously with Spoonflower printing and colour - saturated colours tend to look a bit washed out, and a blue I was trying to work with came out far too grey. It will be a while before I get more designs I like that work within Spoonflower's limitations.

Thanks for reading!