While I usually sew my own designs, occasionally a pattern speaks to me, and I just have to have it. I have always admired McKenna Ryan’s beautiful and intricate designs but never ventured to make one of her quilts. About ten years ago, I came across a kit for a wall hanging from her And On That Farm quilt. This block, titled She Had Some Chicks, immediately caught my attention. Being a cat lover, I thought the design was absolutely adorable. So I bought the kit, and into a drawer it went.
I finally decided to make it last year, and the process was surprisingly frustrating. The kit, unfortunately, was not complete. It was missing all of the red fabrics and a few others, and one of the background fabrics was the wrong colour. Since this kit was supposed to include the original fabrics McKenna Ryan designed for the quilt, I found it a bit disappointing. However, this was not the designer’s fault, and luckily, I had enough batik scraps to find suitable replacements, and I bought a new background fabric that I thought matched quite well.
I knew, of course, that McKenna Ryan’s designs involve a lot of small pieces. You all know I love doing machine appliqué, but it turns out my designs do not have pieces that small after all. McKenna’s patterns include some incredibly tiny pieces that can only be handled and placed with tweezers. Thankfully, I have a Brother ScanNCut, so I didn’t need to worry about precisely cutting all those tiny curves. However, since I have never used the Brother for scanning—my own designs are converted into a file format the machine accepts—I discovered its scanning capabilities are rather limited. It recognized maybe half of the pieces, and I had to manually edit the rest. Still, I would much rather edit them on the computer than attempt to cut them out by hand.
I ran into another hiccup when I realized I had not thought things through properly. I should have reversed the pattern templates to match the way I cut my pieces with the Brother ScanNCut. As a result, my quilt ended up being a mirror image of the original design. There are worse things, though, so I didn’t overthink it. I simply flipped the placement guide and carried on.
Placing all those tiny pieces was a nightmare, and I absolutely hated it. I was so relieved when I finally finished. When I purchased the background batik, I had also chosen a backing fabric, so I quilted it right away. I started with some stitch-in-the-ditch around the borders, outlined the main design, filled the background with a swirly pattern and added a different swirl to the outer border. The rest of the quilting secured the appliqué with free-motion stitching along the edges of the pieces. It required many thread colour changes, but that is my favourite way to appliqué small, curvy pieces and, I believe, also the method McKenna Ryan recommends for quilting her designs.
I was contemplating giving the finished wall hanging away because I did not want to be reminded of how much I hated assembling it. But this was last summer, and it took me until December to actually do the binding. By now, the memory has faded, and I am quite happy with the result. I will probably keep it after all and even put it up on the wall once I find the right spot. That experience, though, has made it unlikely that I will try another of McKenna Ryan’s designs anytime soon.
