A growing EPP obsession…

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

Over the last couple of weeks I have been gallivanting to a wedding in Southern California, traipsing around Disneyland and teaching a bunch of wonderful 8 to 10 years old sew doll clothes. It has been fun and action packed, but there has been only a sprinkling of quilting… and all of it has been English paper piecing.

My go to travel project has become my new obsession… For the California trip I packed my mini Liberty dresden kit…

… I managed to get quite a few dresdens blades done while sitting on the plane or by the pool…

… I have become a little obsessed with finding little scraps of Liberty to add to this project…

… and I really do mean mini scraps. I can get two blades easily from a 2 1/2 inch square!

My other ongoing summer travel project, my hexagon pelt, has gone with me to games nights, picnics and camping….

I grab this kit regularly when we are heading ona long drive or out to events… just in case I get time to baste a few hexies….

I also have just started basting some mini Cotton and Steel hexies. I had so many little scraps of fabric left over after making a couple of Cotton and Steel mini quilts for the swap (check out the post here to see two of them) that could not got to waste so…

The C+S hexagons were made from scraps that were too small for my main hexagon pelt (main pelt hexie size is 1 inch)…

Now three EPP projects on the go at the same time might seem excessive, but I am sure I can handle a couple more…. you see, last week for my birthday I got these books…

..and the July copy of Love Patchwork and Quilting which had this free gift with it…

…plus I also discovered that you can use the EQ7 quilting program to print out quilt blocks in segments….. I think my obsession with hand work may have only just started…

3Aug2015

Making paper piecing Lemonade…

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

So a couple of weeks ago I realised I had made a hideous paper piecing miscalculation…. it all started in December last year when I had lots of time sitting around hospitals with my darling husband. I wanted to bring hand work but my hexie pelt…

..had become unruly and unmanageable. I had taken the cardboard papers out of the center to help make it easier to handle but it was too big for me to keep adding hexies easily. The solution was of course to start a second pelt that I could just sew to the first pelt when it got big enough. Great solution right?….

In theory yes… in practice I stuffed it up big time. Fast forward five months and I go to attach the second pelt only to discover my second pelt would not fit my first pelt. The two pieces would not align no matter what way I put them. My huge miscalculation resulted in a tantrum, lots of tears and copious amounts of swearing.

My darling husband, who has claimed the hexagon pelt as his quilt, tried to comfort me…but somehow failed to grasp the complete heart ache of spending months hand sewing something together only to realise you are going to have to unpick it all. The worst bit was that I had removed all but a few of the papers which made the flowers almost impossible to reattach to the main pelt… it is very tricky to get neat, even stitches without the cardboard supporting the hexagon.

So I put everything aside, not sure when I would be ready to face the horrible task ahead of me, and uncertain about what to do with the hexagons that could not be re-attached. Then Sunday it dawned on me what I needed to do….

The idea came from a special quilt that was made for Rachel of Stitched in Color…. I had made hexagons for this quilt and watched it slowly come together. This was the solution to my problem.

And so I have started gluing….

and sewing my hexagons onto a 6 1/2 inch square low volume background…

and I am loving the effect.

I will have enough flowers from my second pelt mishap to make a baby quilt. I can not tell you how excited I am to find such a pretty solution to my issues. I have definitely made lemonade out of those lemons!

27Jul2015

More red white and blue…

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

As July comes to an end so does my red, white and blue pinwheel blocks….

I mixed the colouring up this week and I love the red background…I hope it works with the other blocks being made for the Quilting Bee…

There is another fun way to make this block, which gives you a very different looking block…still with a lot of movement in it.

If you would like to use the free pattern just download the PDF by clicking the link…Fireworks Pinwheel Block.

Enjoy….

20Jul2015

Trying something different…

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

Welcome to Paper Piecing Monday and something a little different… This weeks pattern is another 12 inch spinning pinwheel for my Do.Good.Stitches bee…

For this block I stayed with the red white and blue colour theme our Queen Bee set but when I was designing this block I thought it would be a great in rainbow colours too, so I played a little in my design program…

But that is not what is different…if you want to really see what has changed you need to download the free pattern… you see I have found that I can make PDF patterns in Word and so things look much prettier… check it out…Simple Pinwheel Block..

Let me know what you think.

13Jul2015

Special Spinning block

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

After two weeks of teaching quilting to kids, I am back to posting…starting with a special quilt block. Last week my Do.Good.Stitches bee was set the challenge for this month to make some red/white/blue spinning blocks.

So I designed this block with the challenge in mind…and over the next couple of weeks I will share the pattern for the blocks I have made for this challenge.

The structure for this pattern was a little different from how I usually do my stars and the pattern needs to be sewn in sections. I must admit I did have to do some unpicking because I sewed one set of my pieces together back to front.