One of my favourite illustrators – Jill Howarth has designed a cute new collection for Riley Blake Designs called Tiny Treaters. Now usually (and I appreciate this may be a little controversial) I am not a fan of Halloween. However the minute I saw the collection, and who it was designed by I had to make the exception!

It really is the cutest Halloween collection you’ll ever see! I thought making something decorative would help me get in the festive spirit when Halloween season is here. So, seeing as I already made some bunting on another project I decided to come up with something a little different (although I will totally be making some bunting with it too!), I wanted to highlight as many of the cute prints as possible and what better way than a Dresden Flower.

A fun and effective way of showcasing some of the fun prints and with a bit of planning there’s no reason why you cant include some cute fussy cutting!

No one in the UK got to go trick or treating last year, hopefully this year they can, but I’m not sure anyone can be as cute as this little trio in the centre of the flower!

I machine pieced the Dresden pieces and then appliqued onto the background fabric by hand. The background fabric, appropriately named Halloween is from the RBD basics collection Gunny Sack. I love this low volume fabric with its perfect fleck of orange and black.

Then of course I had to add some handquilting, always one of my favourite parts of any project! Here I used Aurifil 12wt in colour #4241 and #2311 on the darker fabrics.

Like most times when I hand quilt I never know when to stop. I could have kept going, and maybe I should have stitched another row on the outer, however I didn’t want to detract from the Dresden, plus I was finding some of the stitches were getting a little lost in with the black lines on the gunny sack fabric.

Finally some black cord was added and it’s now ready to hang up when the time comes.

I had intended to make some little treat baskets alongside it but sadly time was not on my side, it has been a rather tumultuous few weeks to say the least! But then we are only in May so I have plenty of time! Watch out for more Tiny Treaters project on the blog soon!

Tiny Treaters will be arriving in stores this month!