Mail Call

Are you familiar with "haul videos" on YouTube where people share the results of their shopping trips?  It kind of felt like that around here today, so here's my version!

I had all kinds of goodies in the mail today.  From Stitchin' Heaven, the foundation papers and instructions for Judy Niemeyer's Prairie Star:

The people at Stitchin' Heaven are super nice.  I called them right at closing time because I always get the time zone in Texas wrong, but they very kindly stayed and answered all my questions, and then sent this out for me the next day.  I love their newsletter too!  Now that I am such a paper piecing fan I had to try this quilt.  It will be for my dad, but in different colours, which I still have to work out.  It will be a few months before I get started on this.

And for the other kind of paper piecing, the pieces for my Botanic Roses quilt arrived today from Paper Pieces:

I also ordered these huge 3" hexagons (6" across) for yet another project:

The 1/2" hexagons are beside them so you can see the scale.  The customer service from Paper Pieces has also been excellent.  They gave me the heavily discounted sale price on the large hexagons even though I placed the order before the sale started.  I think that is really admirable, and I am planning another order from them soon!

From Nordic Needle I received my perle cottons for Sedona Star:

I had a weird exchange with Nordic Needle this time, which I'm hoping was just an aberration, because they've always been good in the past.  These are Size 8 DMC perle cottons, which were actually finer than I expected.  They will probably be excellent for quilting, but I am considering ordering some of the heavier ones for the seam treatments and embroidery.  I really want something chunky that will show up well on the quilt.

And to top it all off, my issue of Inspirations 74 arrived today:

As you can imagine, I haven't had time to even open it up yet!  But, I think this will all keep me busy for a while!

First Month 5 Ring

I have been very productive, but it has largely been more of the same, so there hasn't been much to show.  All my Sedona Star Month 3 and Month 4 rings are complete, and I've started on the paper piecing for Month 2.  The templates and fabric strips for Month 2 have been sitting on my sewing table for over a month, and I have to move them every time I sew, so I am really looking forward to getting them done and out of the way!

Yesterday we had a free sewing day at my guild Rouge Valley, and I finished a lot of the units for Month 5.  This morning I put the first ring together:

I did manage to fix my wobbly Month 4 a couple of days ago, it is now completely flat.  So once again I was feeling confident this morning as put together this ring.  And sure enough, it has a wobble too!  But I don't think it is so bad that I have to redo anything.  The overall size is just a smidgen small, so it will fit into the outer template fine.  I am finding that it is so important to stay focused on this quilt!

All these points are supposed to be the same size.  The reason the light yellow ones look longer is due to the way the seam allowances are pressed.  I am pretty sure it will look fine once it is sewn into the outer block.

I really love all the fine sharp points on this block.  And I realized when I was cutting the fabrics that this time I actually followed the instructions for the colour placement!  You won't see that very often on this quilt.  Anyway, there is still lots to do.  Happy sewing!

Botanic Roses Quilt

As I mentioned yesterday, a new English Paper Pieced project is in the works.  It has been growing in my mind for several years now!  The idea started with this old UFO of mine:

This is a design that was on the cover of Australian Patchwork and Quilting several years ago.  The blocks are made up of what I now know are called "kite" shapes.  Each block is 18" across and has 72 pieces.  It was made by tracing the template for each piece, carefully cutting with a 1/4" seam allowance added, and then hand piecing in the usual way with a running stitch.  It was very slow and painstaking work!  I really hate piecing from templates, by machine or by hand - never again!  The project ground to a halt four or five years ago mainly because the white on white background fabric is printed with a gummy paint that is very difficult to hand sew.  I had wanted to hand quilt it too, and I realized that it would be impossible with that background fabric.

Just over a year ago I learned about English Paper Piecing and that it is possible to buy pre-cut paper pieces.  It was quite a revelation!  No more templates, no more worrying about seam allowances, what a relief!  I almost restarted the project right then, with plain white fabric for the background.

But, somehow I didn't want to do exactly the same thing that I had already been doing.  I felt that I hadn't been disciplined enough in my fabric choices and strayed from my original plan.  I wanted to narrow down the colour scheme.  In my mind, these blocks had always reminded me of roses.  One day I was looking at my favourite dishes, and I had an idea!

Botanic Roses by Portmeirion

I decided to reproduce the colours of the roses in the blocks.  And, I thought, why not add the leafy border from the plates around the whole quilt?  I wanted to keep it to a lap quilt though, so I also decided to shrink down the blocks to 12", which would require 2" kites, which were readily available. It seemed like a good plan.  But still not perfect!

I had a close look at the plates and thought about how to convey the impression of roses with the fabrics.  I noticed that the roses on the plates have a lot of detail in the middle, while the original quilt pattern is kind of blocky in the middle.  I realized that the English Paper Piecing technique would allow for smaller pieces and more detail, so I decided to subdivide the centre hexagon into smaller pieces like this:

The very centre will be a solid 1/2" hexagon, surrounded by 1/2" half hexagons, surrounded by modified kite pieces.  I can buy the first two, and the modified pieces will be easy to make by trimming the regular kite pieces.

The final piece of the puzzle was fabric choice.  I did not have enough of the right colours in my stash.  About a month ago I realized that it would be beautiful to do all the roses in batiks.  Another revelation!  I spent a considerable amount of time playing with various fabrics on the eQuilter design board.  They are great, you know, I find the colours are generally very accurate.  My one worry was that my fabric choices would result in a very low contrast colour scheme, and all the detailed piecing would be lost in the final quilt.

So, I took the lowest contrast set of fabrics from my cart (for the pale pink rose), printed them, cut them, and made a paper mock up of the final block to see how it would look:

It IS pretty low contrast, but you can still see the piecing.  And it will be fun to play around with different arrangements of the same fabrics, because each rose will be done two or three times.

Sold!  Now I am back to my usual routine of waiting for packages to arrive.  I have no pressure on myself to finish this project quickly.  I have found that English Paper Piecing is a great thing to do when I am unwinding in front of the tv, so I will save it for my quiet times.  Although, I do have the feeling that I am going to be extremely keen when the fabric arrives!