Jacky-Oh! Something Wicked This Way Comes..

I'm pleased to introduce you to my friend Jacky-Oh! He's a jack-o-lantern that has come to visit for the Something Wicked This Way Comes blog hop!

I was participating in Kristy from Quiet Play's Practically Paper Piecing blog hop when I heard that Soma from Whims & Fancies was organising a Halloween themed paper piecing blog hop. The catch? You had to design an original block. No worries... I'd just received a copy of EQ7 for my birthday from my husband, how hard could designing my own block be??

I knew straight away that I wanted to do a Jack-o-lantern block.. after all, carving pumpkins is one of our favourite Halloween traditions.

I found a free stock photo of a Jack-o-lantern, imported it into EQ7 and threw myself right in the deep end! It took a few tries, but eventually I came up with a block design worth testing:

He turned out ok, but highlighted the fact that very small lines in EQ turn out to be large lines in real life (the part where the left eye isn't actually a triangle - it's not my bad sewing, it was a design flaw!) So I went back and tweaked the pattern a few more times, adjusting his eyes and his teeth..

Alternate tooth position

 I printed out my new pattern, tested it out and voila! A delectably scary Jack-o-lantern!

 I decided that my two blocks would make fantastic snack mats for Bean and Blossom, so I backed it with some super cute jack-o-lanterny goodness (Dem Bones, Carol Eldridge for Andover Fabrics) and ditch quilted it with some Aurifil 28wt thread. I regularly use Aurifil 50wt (this was pieced with white #2024) but I'd never tried out the 28wt.. As luck would have it, I had a spool of orange #2150 from a sample pack that I won some time ago.. and it was the perfect Halloween orange! The 28wt was an absolute delight to sew with, and while it's not super obvious in the quilting (because it's quilted in the ditch), it looks amazing on the binding. I chose a decorative stitch that reminded me of candy corn, to match the candy corn fabric that I used as binding. Seriously, this snack mat is good enough to eat!

 Jacky also looks super scary when he's backlit by the setting sun. No evil spirits will be visiting here!

To be safe around the children though, we might just illuminate him with our faux candle lantern that Grandma brought home for them.

If you like Jacky-Oh! and would like to make a pumpkiny friend of your own, you can find the pattern for free at Craftsy :) There is also an "Extended Edition" available for purchase that has additional templates to create a range of different pumpkin personalities!