Valentine's Heart Humps
When I get home from work, I spend a lot of time trying to decide if I want to work with fabric or yarn. With this project, I decided to do both! I wrote up a little pictorial in case you need an easy and adorable last minute Valentine's gift or decoration. If you make one of your own, tag me on IG @krystinah_mn because I would love to see it!
This is a super cute mini quilt that ends up around 9x11 or so (not counting fringe). I started with four six inch squares, two in each color (Kona Snow and Cardinal). If you wanted to do this in a charm pack-friendly way, just make these 5" squares or 10" squares and size the rest of the components to match. I drew out a template for the "heart humps" on freezer paper, so just freehand this until you get a look that you like. I ended up getting one curve I liked, so I just cut the template out folded in half based on that line!
Pair up your fabrics, and cut two at a time out of the template. Set aside the outside pieces of your heart color, and the inside pieces of your background color (and make another mini with those!). Cut about 3/8" off of each of the outside pieces, and sew up your heart humps. I ended up cutting these down to 5" squares. Ifyou're having a hard time getting things smooth, I started at the top of each hump and worked to the edges and then trimmed them down.
Once you've got the humps sewn up, sew them together side by side. Cut out a piece of your background fabric (Snow) that is as wide as your humps and as long as you desire, and sew that to the top of your humps. This is a fun project to goof around with proportions, even though mine were pretty unadventurous.
The most tedious part of this project is definitely the fringe. I used Knitpicks Palette Fingering in Pimento, which was a decent match with the Cardinal. Palette is 100% wool, which means that it doesn't really drape all that well and ends up sticking to itself a lot. If I had the yarn in my stash, I would probably suggest going with something that had some bamboo or silk mixed in to make it a bit slippier and hangier (both technical terms).
I averaged about 10 lengths per inch, and I found the best way to do it (especially with the wool) was lay it down on my mini-pressing board (which is in sore need of a recovering). The fabric helped hold the lengths a little straighter and keep them from moving as much. I cut out two 1.5" widths of cardstock, which I used to sandwich the fringe and make it easier to move and position without tangling. I bagged this quilt (see here for a good tutorial- I really like bagging minis because it gives it a really modern look and sometimes binding minis can be a pain), so I cut out my backing and batting and arranged them so it went (from top down) batting, top right side down, backing right side up.
Make sure your fringe is tucked to the middle so it doesn't get caught in a side seam (it's annoying when that happens) and that it's lined up about a quarter inch from the quilt edges so that it spans the whole length of the bottom. Sew a quarter inch around the edges, leaving a three to four inch opening at the top for flipping, and then carefully flip right side out (don't yank your fringe out!).Top stitch around the edge and add a hanging tab, if you so desire! To trim the fringe, I operated under a loose four parts humps, five to six parts fringe. So, my humps are about 4, 4.5 inches, my fringe at the longest is about 6 inches. I straightened my fringe with the steam setting on my iron, combed it, and cut with a rotary cutter.
