Pocket Commotion

Have you seen this pattern?  Motion Commotion by Suzanne McNeill http://www.d-originals.com/.  During one of my online surfing moments it appealed to me.  And I thought it was a good candidate for a potential class because a lot of people are intimidated by curved piecing.  The description of the pattern said, "Easy Pattern with Straight Seams that Look Curvy!"  An enticing description.  It arrived in my mailbox quickly and upon receiving it I realized that is was made using precuts, either a layer cake or four charm packs.  Perfect!  My focus was to create classes using precuts.  So many of us are drawn to purchase precuts but are lost when it comes to using them.  AND I just happen to have a Tonga Treats Lollipop layer cake which is what was used for one of the quilts on the pattern cover.  This just keeps getting better!

So, here's my finished quilt.  Of course I can never seem to make a quilt according to the pattern and this was no exception.  There are an extra six blocks in my version cuz I wanted it a little BIGGER (from 46"x64" to 56"x65").  Of course, that meant a layer cake was not BIG enough so I had to pull coordinating fabrics from my very limited supply of batiks (REALLY! I have a VERY SMALL stash of batiks).  AND the thing that I thought was VERY CLEVER was that I made some of the blocks dimensional, 12 blocks have pocket!  But then... all those clever little pockets made the quilting process more difficult.  :-(  And then... when I was searching for a picture of the pattern to post here for you I discovered a video the designer made showing you how to make the blocks with pocket!  Oh well, so much for being clever.

I am not intimidated by curved piecing and for me it was more difficult to use this technique to create the illusion of curved piecing than it is to do curved piecing.

And I happen to be a label maker.  For me the label is part of making a quilt.  As you can see I titled this quilt Pocket Commotion (because I was proud of the pockets and they did cause some quilting commotion).  Often times my labels contain more info than this one.  Such as who it was made for or what inspired the design if it's one of my originals.  They are always printed on my home printer using a word doc program.  Sometimes I include a printed picture representing the theme or a pieced block from the quilt front and I've also done applique work on labels.  Labels are like little quilts!