Project Quilting Challenge 10.4 Pixel Play

My personal recipe for  happiness is "Someone to love, something to do and something to look forward to."  Participating in Project Quilting this season has filled my cup 2/3 of the way! I have loved having these projects to "do" as much as I have loved looking forward to the announcement of the next theme.  There's something so satisfying about getting the theme, then letting the creative juices flow.  The planning, the making, the problem solving..it's all good for my heart and soul.  This week our prompt was Pixel Play.  We were challenged to explore pixels in any way we chose. I sneaked a peek at my phone during brunch with friends on Sunday to check the challenge, pondered it on the drive home, and by that evening I had a plan and a start!

Image from Google.  Isn't it pretty?

After a bit of browsing through Instagram and Pinterest, I found a small pixelated image of a flower in a Google Image search and decided to go with that. It reminded me of a cherry blossom, and SPRING, which can't come soon enough!

I've never made a pixel quilt before, but I remembered reading a tutorial once, where the squares were fused to a backing, which was folded along the lines, and long , quick seams were sewn instead of a hundred teeny tiny seams.  I have searched and searched for a similar tutorial  to watch again and to post here, but can't find one.  If anyone has a good name for this method, please let me know!

Fusible Interfacing scrap from T-shirt quilt making.  Perfect!

After counting the squares in my image, I drew a grid on a scrap of fusible interfacing.  I decided to make the squares three quarters of an inch.  I found all of the colors I needed in my scrap baskets, and since I was making the squares small, I had plenty of each color!  I put them on a mini cake stand so they were close by and handy.  So cute!

I fused two rows at a time using just the tip of my iron.  Eventually, I switched to my mini iron, and had the whole image ironed down in a flash!  It was SO FUN!  It reminded me of the diamond painting project that my daughter worked on while she was in the hospital.  It's very calming to do something so repetitive and methodical.

 The fun continued as I folded and stitched my way across the grid!  It really is gratifying to play with a new technique and see it work!

Oh! That texture!  Squeeeeeee!

I LOVE the way the back of the piece looked after I had sewn the seams in both directions.  And it felt neat, too.  I ran a seam ripper down each fold of interfacing hoping to reduce the bulk and soften up the piece a bit.  I was pleasantly surprised at how quick this process was!  I will use this technique again, and, if I can find a tutorial to actually follow, I might even be able to do it better!

Once the piece was finished, I had a hard time deciding what it should become.  Somehow, it just didn't seem to want to be a mini quilt.  Mostly,  I think, because I didn't have any idea how to quilt it.  I certainly didn't want to try to stitch in the ditch, or even around the image with all those seams and that interfacing in there.  I thought about framing it, but that didn't feel right, either.  Finally, I settled on making it into a fabric basket.

That floral print is my all time favorite!  It's just a print from JoAnn many years ago, but I love it. It's almost gone, now!

I added two borders, one of which is my all time favorite fabric, and found a really pretty green print for the body of the basket.  That green fabric has been in my stash for a couple of years, and I've never done anything with it.  I have a LOT of it, so I must've intended it for a garment at one point.  I also had an untouched, purchased by mistake and never returned roll of Craft-Fuse that got called into action for this project!  I LOVE that I'm using this stuff!  I have not had to  buy a single thing for any of these challenges.  SO satisfying!

I'm not quite happy with the placement of the flower panel on the basket. There's a bit too much green on the top.  I had to fiddle and re-do and MATH a bit to get it where it is, and not on the bottom of the basket, though, this isn't too bad.   I also wish I had used white thread in the bobbin when top stitching around the top.  I just might take it apart one day and redo..especially if I decide to make this a  county fair entry this summer.  But, for now, I have a pretty little fabric storage basket that reminds me Spring is on the way.

This basket measures approximately 10x10x7 inches and was made by me, in Slinger, Wisconsin.

This post is linked up at this week's Project Quilting Challenge.  Can't wait for next week's challenge!