paper piecing frenzy

Last week I showed you the centre of a new quilt that I'm making.  The pattern is NY Beauty Circle of Flying Geese, which you can buy here.  I spent ages laying out fabrics to follow the colour wheel, then cutting rectangles out ready to paper piece.

Then I paper pieced.

This is the first time I've used a low volume bacground, and I really hope it's going to work.  As I'm putting the blocks together, it doesn't look good, but somehow it seems to all come together when each section is done.  

Having finished the four sections of flying geese, I started on the pointy bits.  And made a mistake.  See it?  There was no way I was unpicking that lot or cutting rectangles to start again, so I chopped the end off the pattern and washi taped it to the beginning!

You can see it in the second low volume section, but I think it will be pretty unnoticeable when the whole quilt comes together.

paper piecing paper piecing

I have been paper piecing paper piecing.  Nope, not repeating myself there.  The lovely East Midlands group of quilters who are modern is entering a quilt into the Festival of Quilts again this year.  I can't disclose what it will be, but I can show you my contribution.

It is, of course paper pieced.  I used Quiet Play's Just My Type alphabet to piece it.  We were each given a dimension that we had to fit into, luckily my size meant that I didn't have to increase or decrease the letters at all, so I'm pretty pleased I didn't have to fight the work photocopier whilst pretending that I was photocopying important work documents and not sewing patterns!

I know.  My hashtag is pretty crap.

But I'm quite pleased with the rest of it!

Can you tell what it is yet?

It was pointed out on Instagram that that's probably a fairly inappropriate thing to say...  In my defense, I thought he was dead.



I posted progress shots on Instagram for May's block for the Sew Kitschy paper piecing bom.  Only one intrepid Instagramer knew what it was.  Can you tell?

Yes, that's right!  (Oh dear, I seem to be hearing those voices again...), it's a food mixer.

A yellow food mixer with a black bum made from Sketch which was the wrong fabric... never mind.

It also features a burnt bit.  I thought I could pretend it's dirt from the chocolate cake the mixer is mixing.

Damn you iron - see what it does?  It's just random, the iron wasn't dirty but every so often it likes to deposit burnt bits on my fabric. Or the husband's shirts... 


Related posts

January - oven gloves
March - bowl

Wooooo weeeee woooo

That was the Dr Who theme tune... did you get it?  Mr CA had a birthday at the end of May.  He's very hard to buy for and his wishlist is very uninspiring.  I needed a plan.  5 minutes on t'internet and 2 tickets were booked for the Dr Who Experience along with a hotel in Cardiff.  Now I wanted to add some homemadeness to the mix.  The next day (after I bought the tickets, not the day after his birthday, that would have been pointless) was the Guild of Modern Quilters of the East Midlands meeting, conveniently held at Stitchcraft... a quilt shop.  

I took the free pattern for a Tardis very generously shared by Trillium, and off I went.  Fabric bought, sewing machine out, massive mess around me, a Tardis was born.

It's paper pieced, though I think that's obvious!  If I'd only thought about it earlier, I could have done some embroidery on it too.  Want to see the back?

No?  Ah well.  I made it up into a zipped pouch.  Quite a large one as the block is 10".

Some stash fabric for the back...

Some more stash fabric for the lining...

One fat quarter wasn't enough for the lining, so I used 2.

The birthday arrived. The pouch was handed over.  Know what he said?  "What is it?"  Well Mr CA, quite clearly it's a Tardis.  "Yes, I know, but what is it?"  

Birthday present FAIL.  And that, ladies and gentlemen, marks the last time I will ever make anything for him.  Ever. 

Piles of quilting...

... waiting to be done.  Damn you Husqvarna who were out of stock of darning feet.  I'm still waiting for mine to arrive so I can quilt this baby:

Sorry for the appalling photo.  I could NOT get the colours at all.  It looks like an Instagram photo, but it's not.  The background is actually black.  I followed the pattern in last month's Love Patchwork and Stitching, but I'm pretty sure I've seen dozens of free versions of this pattern on the internet.  It's paper pieced.

This is a cushion for Jacob to match the quilt I've nearly finished... post coming soon (if I ever finish stitching the damn binding down!).  I used Oh Fransson!'s Mod Mosaic tutorial and really love the effect.  I wanted to use the 20" cushion insert I had, but I wanted it to be puffy and full, so I made the cushion cover 21".  Yep, went the wrong way there!  It will have to be cut down to 19".  I got the insert out to see how much bigger it was and realised I'd bought an 18" insert... oh dear.  I hope the Range has some 20" as Jacob's coming up at the weekend!  

Check out my mitred corner!  Take that Y-seams, you are NOT hard.  I have to get this hand quilted (in Perle) and made up, I suspect I'll be doing it at this weekend's Quilt Guild meeting.  Ladies, prepare for a panicky Wendy!

Sew Kitchsy - paper pieced bowl

As I mentioned back in January Kristy at Quiet Play is running another one of her fabulous paper piecing BOMs. The theme is Sew Kitschy and it is retro kitchen items.  I don't have space for a wall hanging in my little kitchen, so I'm making the blocks and turning them into practical items. What we needed most were trivets for putting hot dishes down on.

I made a bad choice for the stripes on the bowl, they're not obvious enough.  Speaking of which, I tend to point out mistakes I've made and things I could have done better in my posts.  There are a few reasons for this and I've been pulled up about it so many times in the comments recently that I thought I'd say something here.

I am not showing you the mistakes so you can say "don't be daft, it's brilliant".  This is a log of the things I've made, warts and all.  Don't you get bored reading blog post after blog post saying "ta-dah!  Look what I've made, it's perfect!".  OK, that's how other bloggers want to write, but I'm not playing.  The stuff I make has faults. Sometimes it's just stupidity on my part, other times I can learn from it.  Why not share?  I'm sorry that it bothers some of you, but I'm really not being down on myself.  Yes, I cocked up.  So what?  I don't care so you shouldn't either.

As you can see, most of the fabrics are Flea Market Fancy.  I'd cracked them out for the appliqued cushion and so thought I might as well use them.  Our kitchen has white units with black tops, and the tiles are multi-coloured, all colours except pink and purple, so anything goes.  I used Sketch for the spoon, it was the perfect choice.  So, I basted this bad boy up- I put on borders after making the block, I've just realised I was waffling about be being crap publicly and forgot to talk about what I made! - I started FMQing and...

What the??  How flimsy must that bit of metal have been?  I thought I'd broken the needle the sound it made, then I saw the needle and was a bit confused until I found this in my lap.  Well, no more FMQing for me... Jacob's quilt definitely won't be done this month now!

Scrappy binding and it was done.  I wanted a go at echo quilting, it's something I've never tried.  Yep, should have done that with a walking foot, not a darning foot!

It's OK though for something that lives on a kitchen counter and gets chucked in the wash with dirty socks every week!

The bar thing broke when I was doing the curlies in the spoon, I just kind of carried on, I was so near the end.

I have completely ran out of things to say about this trivet...  Oh, I don't much like the way I did the borders.  I didn't have enough of one print to do them all, so I should have mitred them.

It's bloody huge.  The bowl section is 10", I added far too much of a border and it's loads bigger than the other one.  I think that's an old pillow case on the back.  I'm not wasting expensive designer fabric on the back of a trivet.

The binding went OK.  I did it by machine as I really couldn't be arsed hand binding it.  It's not perfect, but it does the job and doesn't look as bad as it sometimes does!

Is this post over yet?  I'm boring myself...


Related posts

January - oven gloves

Copycat

Being a shameless sheep, when I saw that Samantha was making some blocks for Thomas Knauer (at his request, not because she's a creepy stalker), I had to make some too.

He's making a large paper pieced quilt and wants people to send him blocks following his paper piecing pattern.  Five blocks spelling out You and Me.

I went with greens for the Me and brown for the You.  I'm not sure I've done the Y right... He hasn't complained yet... 

paper pieced bunny

Before I begin, I'm still making my way through the GYB list, so please don't be offended if you've visited me and I haven't visited you back yet... it will happen eventually!  Also, if you've got word verification, please, please, please consider turning it off.  Oh, and if you reply to comments in your own comments, don't bother replying to mine.  I have enough on trying to read all the posts of the blogs I follow, let alone revisiting each post two or three times to see if the blogger has replied.  I'm sorry if you think that's rude, but I just don't have time.  OK, that's all, on with the post. 

When Kristy at Quiet Play put out a call for pattern testers with the mention of a bunny pattern, I practically bit her arm off.  Well OK, I didn't as she lives in Oz, but I would have done had she been in the vicinity.  She very graciously let me test the bunny, and didn't even try to foist an emu on me (not that I would have minded, it's a lovely emu).  

Before I began, I had to set up my sewing space.  I walk from my machine to the ironing board, the back to the other side of my machine to trim.  I was burning too many calories and even stuffing my face with chocolate as I sewed wasn't going to help.  So I pulled the ironing board over.

Simple.  Why have I never thought of that before?!?  For your viewing pleasure, he's a view of my creative chaos from the other side.

Kristy's patterns are top notch, there were no problems at all with the pattern.  A little bit of user error, but only what you've come to expect from me.  What's a paper piecing session without upside down, back to front or inside out pieces?

Hello little bunny!  This one isn't any of my rabbits.  I think the shape would be best suited to Ellis, but I thought it would be boring in white, so I used the Sketch I used on my appliquéd Colin.

The background is from one of my Stash bundles from The Village Haberdashery.  I was saving them, but then gave myself a stern talking to.  I can't keep buying fabric and then saving it for nothing in particular!

In the spirit of not creating more WIPs (360 is enough for any girl), I made it into something straight away.

I added borders, a back, a zip and some lining and called it a project bag.  It's about 12" square and doesn't have a boxed bottom (because I forgot), but it will be suitable for embroidery projects.

I couldn't find a big enough piece of fabric for the lining, so I went with two pieces of fabric sewn together.  I thought the sewing print was quite apt.

This pattern, along with a whole lot more, is available in Kristy's Craftsy shop.  I highly recommend her patterns.

Sew Kitschy

After completing the And Sew On BOM last year, I knew I would also join in with Kristy's BOM this year, Sew Kitschy.  Then January came and pretty much went as fast as it had arrived.  I didn't think it was going to happen.  Then, out of the blue, I just did it.  It's quite a simple pattern, perfect for beginner but I wanted to add something more to it.

So I made an economy block for the potholder!  Yep, just the one economy block.  And it has a little birdy sitting on an arm chair.  

And here's my finished block.  Our kitchen has black counters and hob and a black floor, the cabinets are all white and the walls will be when we paint them.  The tiles are multi-coloured so any colour scheme goes, though I'm drawn towards red.  I bought some new oven gloves in Tesco last week which are red gingham with little birdies.  I wanted to piece the oven glove in red gingham but the only one I had was too dark, so I went with this pretty print.  The back ground fabric is black to represent our kitchen counters.

Now I had an issue.  Not the FMQ issue (which I'll come to later), this was when I came to quilt the potholder.  It just wouldn't work, I couldn't sew it.  Then I realised why.  I'd forgotten to remove the paper!! Just from that square.  Surgery was required.

I'd already quilted the background so I couldn't just undo it!  I cut a hole in the back and wrangled the paper out.

So what do you think of the quilting?  I took Trudi's advice and FMQ'd random swirly loops.  I'm sure it looks like a dog's dinner to all your accomplished quilters, but I'm quite chuffed with it.  I had an issue 3/4 of the way through.  I'd just finished quilting, turned it over and it was loop and nest city on the back!  You know what I'd done?  I'd forgotten to put my presser foot down!  I made sure to keep checking after that.  

The potholder and glove are done in straight lines in a grid, just like my real oven gloves.  And that hole I cut in the back?  (not sure why Blogger is forcing me to have this bit of text centred)

I used a small square of fabric and glued hems around the edges, then glued it in place and quilted over it!  It is the back!

I think you can see I have slight tension issues, along with wibbly stitching, but my tension wheel doesn't seem to do anything at all.  I'm convinced it's just there for decoration!

I used what little there was left of the oven glove print for binding, but it was nowhere near enough, so I added in some of the blue star from the economy block.  My binding is a mess.  There was no way I was doing this by hand, my evening sewing is my crewel work at the minute and this is a trivet, so I did it on the machine.

And ripped half of it out as it hadn't caught the binding on the back, and redid it.

And it still looks a mess.  It's staying a mess.   After all, this is a trivet"

This is sitting on our ceramic hob, the perfect place to put hot dishes taken out of the oven.  I asked Mr CA if he knew what it was.  He said "yes, it's to put hot dishes on", so I explained that I wanted to know if he knew what the picture was.  He said "yes, it's a bird or something on a chair."  Oh dear...