Some more mini fun for Paper Piecing Monday

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

A couple of months ago I signed up for another mini quilt swap, this time for Heather Ross fabric… it was another opportunity to make a fun little quilt and I could not resist.

When I pulled out my Heather Ross stash I knew I wanted a quilt block that allowed me to do some serious fussy cutting…and after some umming and ahhing I decided on a simple triangle block.

These blocks are 2 1/2 inches square and are the perfect size to fit some of the darling illustrations on the fabric…

I made each block individually, so that I could play with layout and colour placement… and turn one block on its side….

But for the free pattern for this mini quilt, I included a two triangle block to make things a little quicker and easier, if you know you layout before you start. You can find the free pattern PDF here….Triangle mini quilt pattern

I was away when the Schnitzel and Boo Mini Quilt swap sign ups were on… but with 1008 people signed up to play there is going to be a lot of mini quilt activity over the next couple of months on Instagram, Flickr and blogs. I love it.

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….

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.

If you are interested in making your own block you can find the free paper piecing pattern here….Special Spin quilt block

29Jun2015

Mini Kaleidoscope Quilt

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

Last week I looked at the bag of Lizzy House fabric scraps I had gathered in the last couple of months and I decided I needed to do something with them… a couple of hours later and I had made this little beauty…

Most of the scraps I was playing with were tiny little bits and so I designed a little, fat kaleidoscope block to make this quilt. A tiny paper pieced block allowed me to get accuracy with my piecing while being able to do some fun fussy cutting…

Each block is made up of four (4) pieces which were 1 1/2 inch square.. the finished block is 3 inches small. This was such a fun quilt to make, and I used a lot of my little white on white scraps as well as my precious Lizzy House bits.