Tackling some challenging blocks

Posted in Quilt patterns, WIP Wednesday by wombatquilts

Things came to a crunch this week with some very over due Bee blocks that could no longer be ignored, no matter how hard I tried.

One of the things I love about doing quilting Bees is that you are challenged, every month, to make different blocks and for me it is a good way to try new, non paper piecing stuff. This month’s challenges included…

This block is 12 1/2 inches square and was requested as part of the ScrapBeelicious Bee. When I first looked at the pattern I was a little overwhelmed, but I cut the squares as I was cutting fabric for another quilt and chain piecing made the process less daunting.

The pattern, Star Value by Happy Quilting, is perfect for a Bee, because you do not want to be making a whole quilt of these suckers. The free tutorial also has the calculations to make the block in different sizes from 12 inches up to 28 inches.

Surprisingly, I had a much more harrowing experience making these Bee blocks…

The ScrapBeelicious January block (yes yes I am very very late with this one) challenged us to make the Ann Marie Horner’s Feather Blocks…

For some reason these were the blocks I had to unpick the most. The center grey spine of the feather was too short and I struggled with getting the pattern pieces to align. In the end I just wanted to make a paper piecing pattern to make this sucker… it would have been so much easier!

The last lot of Bee blocks for this week were a simple and fun….

My February do.Good.Stitches Block was the Starflower block by Ellison Lane. This block was so easy and the pattern makes two blocks at a time… genius!

So I have now done my quota of half square triangles (HST) for the month. For the rest of the month I am only tackling those suckers via paper piecing.

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.

27Jan2014

Another Neon Monday

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

This week I was just not able to make myself do another blue block… so to mix things up I thought I would make another Neon block. I recently inherited some Michael Miller Neon scraps and a couple of unused Neon blocks and thought I would try to make a neon quilt for the PMQG charity drive. So here is my first contribution to the quilt…

This is pattern is not too complex but I like how the star seems to have a frame. I did manage this week to get all my points to align and I really learnt from last weeks palava, which means the pattern is ready for use. You can find it here…WQ Neon Star block 1.

I am taking a brief break from my Starry Nights and I am looking forward to doing some non-star paper piecing blocks for this Neon quilt.

13Jan2014

Paper Piecing Monday… better late than never

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

Paper Piecing Monday was delayed a little this week by a stonking cold that took me out of action for a few days. I am feeling a little more human today and managed to get this simple little star block made, thru the Dayquil/Lemsip haze…

This block is 6 inches by 6 inches and was again designed in response to my search for smaller star blocks for my Starry Night Quilt. This is a much simpler block than last week, I got a ribbing for calling last week’s block “simple” at 40 pieces. This week’s 20 pieces is definitely simple…right! You can find the pattern here…Starry Night WQ block 2.

I like the 4 triangle piece pattern of this block and may fiddle some more with it to get some different kind of stars. Next week I am going to scale up and aim to get a 10 inch block designed and made… stay tuned.

6Jan2014

Yep more Starry Nights

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I had struggled to find some smaller blocks for my Starry Night quilt, so I have been working on designing some smaller blocks for my quilt. This week’s block is a simple 8 inch block…

You can find the pattern I made here…WQ Starry Night Block 1. It is a simple 40 piece block with no really small pieces (which is the problem I found with shrinking a lot of the more complex patterns).