Paper Piecing Monday overload

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

Today’s paper piecing Monday is a “three for the price of one” deal. I got a little carried away doing my neon blocks last week and thought I would share all the blocks I made. First up is…

A flying geese block, of sorts. I wanted a graphic block that was not a star and this is where I ended up. I think you can have a lot of fun with this block, depending on how you choose to colour it and lay it out.

It is a pretty simple block and you can find the paper piecing pattern here…Neon Lost Geese. Next up I did another graphic block…

I know I am going to revisit this block because I am dying to make this pattern with a more scrappy approach and fussy cut centers. Too much fun. I have made a 6 x 6 inch pattern for this block, Neon Square block but I think I will enlarge the block for my scrappy version.

The last neon block I made this week was a re-do of a paper piecing pattern I made last year…

Yep I revisited the marvelous Julie @ 627Handwork’s Marley block. You can find the free pattern here. This pattern is fabulously bold, geometric and perfect for this quilt sampler. I now have only two more blocks to go before I can finish this quilt up.

14Feb2014

Rocking my wonky world…

Posted in Finished Quilts, Scrap quilts by wombatquilts

A couple of weeks ago I spent a very fun day at the monthly PMQG Charity Sew meet up. The event is held at the fabulous Modern Domestic (my new home away from home) and I got to spend many happy hours sewing on a beautiful Bernina 560. In a day of wonderfulness the most amazing thing was having my wonky star world rocked by one of my fellow PMQG sewers, Cherri.

Wonky Stars have been a fun staple in my sewing repertory for a while. It is s a quick and easy way to make fun kids quilts and if you peruse my “Finished Quilt” tab you will see a few of them in there. So for years I have been cutting out my 5 inch squares, using my scraps to make star points and calling it good… but no longer. Here is how the new wonky stars block goes…

1. Take eight 5 inch x 5 inch squares of your background fabric… in this case various whites and creams.

2. Grab a pile of scraps in your colour scheme…for this exercise red.

3. Sew random fun bits of scraps together to make a squarish shape, making sure that it is a bit bigger than 5 inches square. Anything goes at this point. You can fussy cut…wonky log cabin or just improv. Then trim your random scrappy square down to 5 x 5 inches.

4. Make four points to you star using the 5 x 5 inch background squares as your foundation and larger scraps for the star points. Trim as needed to get a 5 x 5 inch square.

5. Sew the block pieces together – 4 plain corner pieces, 4 star point pieces and your fabulous scrappy center piece.

6. For an added extra bit of wonky fun at the Sew Day we then trimmed our blocks down to 12 1/2 inches square. This step allowed us to put the stars a little off center and added another element of randomness to the layout. The blocks work just as well trimmed down to 14 x 14 inches too.

And voila you have a fabulous wonky star with a scrappy center piece.

I can not believe I did not think of this technique myself. It is genius and the best way to use those little bits of fabric in your scrap bin. It was such a fun exercise this week to take all the wonky stars everyone made at the Sew Day and put them together into one loud, fun, wonky top.

There is a combination of solid centered stars and scrappy centered stars in this top and I think it works nicely.

And every star is so very very different. There was a lot of fun techniques used for the scrappy centers…

Because it is a kids quilt we went with bright colours, novelty prints and lots of fussy cutting. My favorite block is scrappy and fussy cut…

The finished top is 60 x 60 inches square and the next step is to find a fabulous PMQG member to quilt this beauty, or maybe we can throw it on the long arm at our next Charity Sew Day.

12Feb2014

Colour Play Turqoise

Posted in Colour Play, Quilt patterns, Scrap quilts by wombatquilts

This week I decided to play with turquoise and my all time favorite neutral, navy blue. There was something about this colour combination and snow that just seemed to work. First I raided my scraps and then pulled this bundle from my stash…

I had used navy and turquoise together before, but with “radiant orchid” and some electric blues thrown into the mix.

This time I wanted to keep it simple, clean, cool. I choose an easy block called “World Without End”. This classic quilt block dates back to the 1900’s and I found some wonderful old examples when searching on-line, including one from the Spencer Museum of Art. For my project I used Quilters Cache’s free paper piecing pattern which you can find here.

This is another quick, fun block that packs a punch, and is perfect for scraps. I just loved how the strong colour contrast with this pattern.

I was surprised how big my turquoise stash was and it has been great fun cutting into it for this project. I have added this to my list of “must finish” for 2014… a list that keeps getting bigger. I need some sewing fairies pronto!

10Feb2014

A Feathered Starry Night

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

This week I am quickly jumping back into my Starry Night quilt, mainly because I think I am close to having all the blocks I want/need…plus I am slightly addicted to the blue-yellow contrast. The result of the weekends playing was this star…

We were snowed in this weekend which allowed me to play a little. I designed this pattern, a copy of which you can find here Starry Night Feathered but instead of printing it out as I usually do, I thought I would give tracing paper a go. So I traced my pattern on the paper, using a good old-fashioned pencil and ruler. This is definitely the down side to tracing paper. I had previously tried to get my inkjet printer to take the extra thin tracing paper but it was not having any of it.

So the advantages of tracing paper are…

(1) it is thin enough that lining up your fabric is easy

(2) the thinness of the paper also means that you get less bulk where seams meet and

(3) my stitches had less give when the paper is remove and the paper was easier to remove.

The downside…

(1) if you can not get it to print on your printer, tracing the pattern is a laborious task

(2) I missed the extra sturdiness that photocopy paper gives your pattern, particularly when sewing the pattern pieces together. My pattern kept flopping over and moving.

(3) it is more expensive per sheet and not as easy to find as photocopy paper.

Okay the experiment is over and so is the snow. I am going to stick with photocopy paper… and go back to using my sheets of cardboard as a background to my blocks instead of wonderful snow.

7Feb2014

A blue finish

Posted in Finished Quilts, Scrap quilts by wombatquilts

This week I managed to get my sister in laws quilt finished, photographed and posted. It took me way longer than I hoped, but I am glad it is finally on its way to sunnier climes.

The quilt was too long to be photographed in my usual spot so I took it out to the local park and hung it on the fence around the baseball practice area. It was a little to wet and muddy to get more creative but I liked the location change-up.

The blocks for the quilt were made using the “Trip Around” technique and tons and tons of blue solids. If you are interested you can read more about the initial design process here.

For the quilting I was originally just going to do straight line stitching in on diagonally on the quilt in one direction. It made the quilt feel like the water was flowing in one direction, which I loved. I then had the brilliant idea to add ten lines of quilting diagonally opposite to the flow to represent the ten years that my sister-in-law has been married…the ten years where her path has intersected with someone else. Okay I was being really sentimental and mushy and I will stop now!

I backed the quilt with the perfect print from Lizzy House’s “Constellations” collection and hand bound it with a variety of dark solids. I am hoping that Christine loves this quilt as much as I do…