Today’s paper piecing Monday I decided to keep it a little simpler – only a four-part pattern!
With this pattern you can decide to not do the pieced center part (just use one piece of fabric to cover the center triangle). This give you a different looking star with less bulk in the center.
You can find the free paper piecing pattern for this 8 inch block here…Stripey Star pattern. Only a few more green blocks to go and then I can star putting this top together.
When the Modern Quilt Guilds of the Pacific Northwest were recently invited to submit quilts for a Quilt Show in August I was a little apprehensive. The guild lines were that the quilts could use black, white and the shades of grey in between and as you can tell from my quilts I love colour. We were allowed, if we wanted, to add one colour in one place but that was it.
I pondered this challenge for a month or so and then one day, as I was talking to an old friend it hit me what I could do. You see in my previous life I was in film and a key essential tool in the camera kit was always a grey card. This card was used to white balance and focus the camera (back in the old days before digital took over!). A grey card would make the perfect quilt for this project….
So I found an image similar to the cards I used to use…
Did some crazy quilts maths… not something I usually do and not something that comes easily to me…
Pulled some greys from my stash…
And went to work. The end result was this…
I am thrilled with how it turned out. I was really impressed with the depth of my grey stash, which allowed me to do some fun colour graduation….
I cheated a bit and used some black and white stripes for the focus bars… I was not going to be able to get that kind of sharp precision with piecing… (but it is driving me crazy that photos in this post seem out of focus unless you click on the image to enlarge it….@%*$#^! WordPress….AUGH!!!!!
I also managed to get my favorite prints, Mirror Ball and Pearl Bracelets into the mix. Now all I have to do is work out how I want to quilt it. I was thinking of echoing the circle on the card in the quilting but that is as far as I have gotten so far. I do know that I am going to add one tiny splash of colour in the binding.
I am really thrilled with this mini quilt (it is 36″ long by 28″ wide)… not because it is amazing or beautiful or revolutionary. I love it because it has such meaning for me. As I stepped out of my film career I stepped into quilting… and this quilt represents that life change for me.
After making my green star for this week I ummed and ahhed about whether to share it on the blog. I love the star, but it suffers from the problem that a lot of paper piecing stars suffer from… a bulky center.
It is a fun star but the center is where 16 points of fabric meet, and as the star is only 8 inches square it makes for a lumpy middle. Now this is a problem that I came across when I first started making paper pieced stars and there are a couple of tricks for minimizing the bulk.
1. Iron seams open… ALL the seams are ironed open on my stars… and when the paper is removed I starch the seams so that all they want to do is stay open.
2. Remove the paper pattern in the corners BEFORE I sew all the pieces of the star together.
This step means you are less likely to get paper stuck in the center joins… and so less bulk.
3. Use tweezers to remove any excess paper that does get stuck….
The only other trick is I have found that quilting through the bulk helps soften it, and with time, washing also softens it too.
Now there is only so much of the bulkiness you can effect… at the end of the day the bulk is there because so many seams are meeting at the same point. I personally think the visual effect of the stars are worth the extra bulk…
Now, if I have not turned you off this pattern, you can find the PDF here….turning star pattern.
Enjoy.
At Christmas my darling husband gave me a set of Munki Munki flannel pj’s. Pajama giving at Christmas seems to be a very American tradition..but I have fully embraced it. When I opened my Christmas package only one thing came to mind….this is going to make a wonderful quilt.
For those of you that are not familiar with the Munki Munki brand, their top designer was/is Heather Ross and collecting the pajama prints and using them for quilts is very popular amongst modern quilters. This is of course what I tried to explain to the husband when he found me cutting up my pajama top.
Seriously how could I resist these darling gnomes…
So a flurry of fussy cutting ensued and my favorite “go to” block pattern, the wonky star, was employed….
What was interesting about making the top in particular for me was that I used all flannel. I had previously back several quilts in flannel…I love the soft finish particularly for baby quilts… but I had never pieced in it.
For this top I used some flannel scraps a friend had given me and bought some more from my local quilt store… and I tried to use as much of the source pajama fabric as I could…including the sleeve and leg cuffs which were bright green.
Most of the flannel I used had a wrong and right side and it was at times tricky to tell which was which…. except for the Cloud 9 flannel which was beautifully thick and lush and was reversible.
The end result was this darling little baby quilt… and I love how soft and cuddly it is.
Hello and welcome to Paper Piecing Tuesday…. yesterday got away from me so this week we are paper piecing a day late.
This week we are back to green stars. I have 5 blocks to go before I have enough to finish my quilt top… So to start this final green wave we have the Alternating Star…
I had fun making this one, alternating light and dark stripes. The PDF pattern for this 8 inch star can be found here…Alternating star pattern. See you next week for another star!
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