Paper piecing the Night Sky

This weeks Paper Piecing Monday is all about the Night Sky. This week I have and will be playing with the background blocks for my Starry Night quilt. My strategy is to use all those scrap pieces of patterns I have printed and lying around the office, with most of them so far being 6 inches square.

I started last week with a half log cabin…

and this week I added some paper pieced crazy blocks….

some left over star pattern pieces from Carol Doak’s book…

some strange flower log cabin pattern I found in amongst the paper pile…

and of course there has to be some flying geese….

I have decided to go with the majority of the sky being paper pieced, as it will make piecing the quilt top together much easier. I find that piecing paper pieced blocks and traditionally pieced blocks together can be fraught with size issues and usually if there is a large enough amount of traditional piecing I remove the paper from my blocks so that everything is “paper less”. If I am just sashing blocks then the paper stays on… it is the best way to ensure accuracy.

So the sky is underway… and despite the disparate style of blocks, they seem to work together well.

Okay I admit there is an insanity to this activity but it is kind of fun. There is no right or wrong… just lots and lots of navy blue, and a smattering of purple. Quilting heaven for me.

4Dec2013

Off Galavanting…

Posted in WIP Wednesday by wombatquilts

For the last four days or so I have been off gallivanting with my husband in Canada. We took the Thanksgiving break to drive up to Vancouver Island and spend some quality off line time together. November has been a crazy month with my husband deciding to write a novel in November (nanowrmo) as well as grow a mustache. This has meant I have not seen much of my him this month and when I have I have not always recognized him!

As we left Portland on our adventure a friend commented that it is great that Nick will not be distracted by writing and I would not be distracted by quilting… my husband just laughed, he knew I had packed this…

My trusty hexagon kit. Yes I somehow managed to quilt while on vacation in the middle of nowhere. I industriously made a stack of hexagons…

and also some more flowers…

which will all be added to the ongoing crazy which is my hexagon quilt.

It has grown a little bit since I last photographed it.

There is no rhyme or reason to how I am adding the flowers… I just add randomly. It is kind of fun.

I am loving making this quilt…though it is slow going. There is something about hand stitching I find very therapeutic.

I will get back to the sewing machine this week but I am not in a hurry… and if you were curious as to just how dodgy my husband looks with a mustache…..

The answer is very dodgy!

27Sep2013

Lost Geese Quilt top finished

Posted in Quilts, Scrap quilts by wombatquilts

This week I managed to get my “Shell logo” inspired flying geese quilt top finished. By the time I had finished laying out this quilt top it had earned the name “Lost Geese”, can you guess why?

Yep is it a little crazy… but kind of fun. Lots of novelty fabric and fun stuff to make the eyes really explore the madness.

I had a lot of fun making the “geese” go all over the place. I love the lack of pattern or rhythm to the piecing (though it frustrated my husband a little). Too really throw things into disarray I added a smattering of yellow triangles on a red background. Chaos rules!

I paper pieced these blocks as I love to have sharp clear triangles in my flying geese and paper piecing is the only way I personally can get that precision. My original post has a paper piecing pattern you can grab if you are interested in trying some geese.

This top has been added to the pile that need basting. I am going to see if I can convince my hubby to help me again this weekend to baste a quilt or two.

23Aug2013

Another log cabin done and dusted…

Posted in Finished Quilts, Quilts, Scrap quilts by wombatquilts

I managed to get my Blush log cabin quilted and bound this week. I am so thrilled with how this quilt finished up and can not wait to see how it washes.

I quilted Blush using the diagonal lines of the log cabin block as a guide. I love how the how this simple quilting adds extra interest to the log cabin.

I must admit I am looking forward to trying some of the free-motion techniques I learned last week at the PMQG Meet Up, but I have a few weeks before my wrist is up for the challenge. So the next few quilts will involve straight lines in some shape or form and in the meantime I will do my free-motion exercises in my new graph paper note-book. As instructed by Rachel (of 2nd Ave Studios) I will be using pen only for the doodling. No erasing.

I found the perfect fabric piece in my stash for the back of this quilt – the Weekend by Erin Morris fabric worked perfectly with a little bit of pink supporting fabric.

The final touch was a solid binding in Magenta which just bought the whole quilt together.

Now I am just a few stitches away from finishing my Yummy quilt so it is back to the sewing machine.

I am linking up with Crazy Mom Quilts and TGIFF.

16Aug2013

Star String quilt top finished

Posted in Finished Quilts, Quilt patterns, Scrap quilts by wombatquilts

I am so thrilled to have finally finished my star string quilt top… and extra thrilled that it turned out exactly like I pictured it. So without further ado, here she is in all her scrappy wonderfulness…

I must admit my strong feelings about this quilt maybe effected slightly because I designed the quilt block. You can find the free paper piecing pattern and details about my inspirations here on the original post.

I had a lot of fun making this quilt slowly, piece by piece. Using colour pencils and paper I worked out each square in advance.

The central stars are made from lots of little bits from my scrap pile. The black and white fabrics were a little bit of scrap pile and a lot of stash cutting.

I wanted bright colours for the stars and mainly worked with red, yellow, orange, blue, green and purple with a smattering of apricot, fuchsia and citron.

The finished quilt top is 62 inches square – five blocks across five blocks down. This of course meant there was a lot of paper to pull off the back.