So I finished up my items for the Modernista Homemade Swap. This is my first round in this swap, but it is the third round it has been running, and each time the participants make something for a specific room in the home, plus a little extra bonus item. This round is for the living room, so I made a table runner for my main item, and a zipper pouch in co-ordinating fabrics for the bonus extra.
I had a request via flickr for details on the fabrics and patterns I used, so I thought I would share them here. Starting with the pouch, I used my favourite pouch tutorial, the open wide zipper pouch from Noodlehead, with a couple of tweaks.
First, I pieced the body of the pouch using scraps from making the table runner. The little blue and orange squares are 1 1/2" square (2" cut), with a solid grey strip 1/4" wide (3/4" cut) on either side. Those pieced strips ended up a little longer than the 10" recommended for the open wide zipper pouch, but left it at that length, and added the charcoal sketch fabric to either side to build the height up to around 7".
I pieced the lining of the pouch out of 4" squares, and then trimmed it down to the same size as the outer pieces. From then, I followed the instructions in the open wide zipper pouch tutorial, except that I did not box the corners. I like boxed corners on a pouch, but leaving it flat just felt like the right thing to do for this pouch.
I didn't use a pattern for the table runner, but it's pretty simple to put together. I cut 4" squares of the solid grey (I think it's Freespirit Designer Solid in Slate Grey) and 4" squares of an assortment of blue and orange fabrics (mostly DS Quilts, with a couple of Denyse Schmidt fabrics thrown in there). I used those to make half square triangles, which I trimmed down to 3 1/2" square - so that the finished half square triangles in the table runner are 3" square.
Creating the chevron design with the half square triangles is pretty simple, and you could definitely expand or reduce this design to fit whatever you're making, from a table runner, to a pillow, to a quilt.
I backed the table runner with a Denyse Schmidt fabric from the re-printed Flea Market Fancy collection. And yes, that dense dense quilting (sometimes called matchstick quilting) did take ages (each 6" section took about an hour to quilt). I did learn a couple of tricks while doing it, so will post a tutorial with my thoughts in the next couple of weeks.
So I hope that's helpful - feel free to ask questions in the comments if you have any!
