Windham Wednesdays with Fiesta - Olé!

I never would have thought of sewing with fabric that celebrates the Mexican holiday "Day of the Dead." You know - sugar skulls and other spooky images. I was raised in California and knew about this. I had a lot of Mexican friends whose families observed it. Fine with me. I got the Easter Bunny and chocolate eggs and some candy canes at Christmas. Plenty of sugar for me!

My middle daughter fell in love with some beautiful sugar skull flower pots from Trader Joe's. Windham has the Fiesta line and sent me some fabrics! Big WOW! And they aren't scary, either.

Fiesta Collection by Windham Fabrics

There are two other fabrics (guitars and sugar skulls) that have the black background, but I didn't get any of that. But I was ready to stitch up some fun things. I looked around on Pinterest and saw a large quilt with a sugar skull in the center of a Dresden Plate. That was good enough for me. I had no idea what size the blocks were, if they used an 18 degree wedge ruler, etc. I just started cutting.

I grabbed my cottage cheese lid and drew a circle on freezer paper, cut out the center and cut out this happy looking face. I interfaced it and it was ready to be the center!

Fussy cutting a Sugar Skull motif

I cut 8" high Dresden Wedges using my own ruler. I added that yellow/gold from Windham's Bedrock collection because I needed a 5th color.

Smiling Sugar Skull with 4 sets of 5 blades.

Here's a pic of my multi-sized Dresden Ruler (8" height). You probably have something similar to this. If you have my Modern Vortex pattern, it's the same size. Each of my wedges for the Sugar Skull was cut from a single (not stripped) fabric.

My Dresden/Vortex ruler

Here's my Bedrock (what I have left from sewing various projects). It's an awesome blender. I've included it several times here in blogville. I was able to get 4 golden wedges from my scraps.

Bedrock blenders by Windham Fabrics

Now, back to those wedges. I stitched them, but Little Miss Sugar Skull wanted to be in the picture (again).

Little Miss Sugar Skull and my 20 dresden wedges.

Stitched 5 wedges together and then appliquéd to a background square. And 3 more times. Trimmed away background fabric BEFORE joining the 4 squares together.

 Appliquéd the interfaced Sugar Skull to the center and trimmed away excess.

Back of Dresden ring

And here she is, right where she wanted to be: center stage, smiling at us!

20-1/2" Dresden with Sugar Skull center

Little Miss Sugar Skull wanted some company, so I gave her two friends disguised as mug rugs. This uses my Coffee Cups paper pieced pattern.

Two Sugar Skull mug rugs (aka, Coffee Cups)

I've made this many times before using several other collections. One was with Mimosa.

Paper pieced Coffee Cups using the 2015 Mimosa Collection by Windham

Here are 10 of them I still haven't finished. Not sure if I want to put them into a quilt.

10 more Coffee Cups!

So, if you're interested, you can find the patterns for:

• Paper Pieced Coffee Cups (digital copy)
• Digital version of Modern Vortex (comes with paper template) - 18 pages with several projects
• Hard copy Modern Vortex (several projects) with acrylic ruler - FREE postage!