Easy, Accurate Paper Piecing Templates

The final piece in the design of my Hen Party quilt was to decide how to finish off the corners of the border.  I wanted the diamonds to flow continuously around the quilt.  Once I realized that I could make the corner diamonds bigger, it all fell into place:

The centre diamonds are the same 3" size as the Seminole-pieced diamonds, and the outer diamond is the full 6" width of the border.

I made my own foundation paper piecing templates for these blocks.  With 1/4" graph paper you don't even have to measure!  Just count out 4 squares to the inch.  I mark dots in all the corners, and then use a ruler to connect the dots.  Easy!

Then I put my original in the copier, set the quality to draft, and run off as many as I like.  The graph lines don't copy, just the darker pencil lines, so you get a very clean template.  Old copiers used to distort the image slightly, so check your copies to make sure they are still exactly to scale.  My Canon All-In-One prints them off perfectly.

I am also still using the Simple Foundations Translucent Vellum Paper, which is so convenient!  When I'm paper piecing triangles like this I start with oversized triangles rather than strips.  This saves fabric, and it also keeps everything on the grain.  The vellum paper makes it easy to be sure the triangles are in the right place before I sew them down.  Vellum is a little more expensive, but because so many of my paper piecing plans involve half square triangles like this, I will probably keep using it.

Hopefully it will not be much longer before I get this top finished.  I am sooo close!

Seminole Piecing

As I mentioned yesterday, I elected to Seminole piece the border for my Hen Party quilt.  I did wonder, when I made the design, if I was biting off more than I could chew, but fortunately it has worked out very well!  The whole key is to slow down and be very deliberate in everything you do.

My border design called for 3" diamonds centred down a 6" strip.  The sides of the diamonds needed to be 2 1/8", so I cut the brown strips at 2 5/8".  In order for the cream edges to be wide enough, I cut the cream strips to 5 1/2".

I sewed the brown strip between two cream strips and ironed the seam allowances towards the centre.  This is an important step, because it makes it easy to match the corners later on.

Then I cross cut the long pieced strips into units that were also 2 5/8" wide.  Then I started to sew the units together in a stepped pattern.  Hopefully the photo makes it clear:

Each border has 17 diamonds.  When I turn the piece on it's side you can see where it's going:

To make sure the diamonds were centred in the final border, I lined up my ruler with the 3 1/4" line along the line where the diamond points meet.  I cut one side, and then turned it around and cut the other side the same way, so that I ended up with a 6 1/2" border strip:

To square off the ends, I added a 4 1/2" half square triangle:

This is bigger than needed, so when I'm ready to do the final assembly I'll trim the sides even and the end down to 1/4" from the point of the diamond.

It seems like a lot could go wrong with all the bias edges here, but the main thing was that all four sides would finish around the same length.  They did!  And I gave myself some wiggle room in the design, which I'll talk about when I get the whole top assembled.

Designing the Hen Party Border

It's taken me a while to organize my thoughts about this border.  I finally realized that it has to be divided into two posts.  So today I'm going to talk about how I came up with the design.

Susan Stewart's amazing quilt "Radiance" won the Bernina Award for Machine Workmanship at Paducah this year.  In this interview she describes how the whole quilt was inspired almost in a flash from one machine embroidery motif.  When I watched it I thought "that's what happened to me!" with my Hen Party quilt.  But now that I am writing it all down, I've realized that's not really true.  The idea for the centre of the quilt came in a flash, but the border took quite a bit of extra thought.

As I've said before, the original inspiration came from the quilt "Peach Cobbler" in Better Homes and Gardens' Sew Scrappy, vol 2, that was published in late 2011.  I took a photo of a corner of the original for you all:

Peach Cobbler

You can see that the designer carried the triangles out into the 2" strip border, and then finished it with 4" squares.  I am a big fan of carrying the block design out into the border, although I intended to complete the diamonds rather than leaving them unfinished.  But I couldn't get it to work with my fabrics, especially when I reduced the size of the blocks.  I thought about using florals in the border instead, but then the border lost all relation to the centre of the quilt.

One day I was looking through the instructions for Sue Garman's "Ruffled Roses," the TQS BOM from last year.  One of her borders caught my eye:

Some time after that I found myself doodling the same border around my Hen Party quilt.  I wasn't concious of the source then, but now I am pretty sure this is where it came from.

With the 1 1/2" corner triangles in my snowball blocks, the cream and brown diamonds that are created finish at 3" high.  I wanted the diamonds in the border to be the same size, and fortunately the math worked out well.  Squares with 2 1/8" sides will measure exactly 3" on the diagonal.  So I decided that Seminole piecing would work well for the borders.

I thought, actually, that Sue Garman also used Seminole piecing in her quilt, but now I see she used four patches:

This image was probably what set me on the track of Seminole piecing:

Isn't it interesting how we pull together inspiration from different sources to make something new? Well, I'm pretty sure several books have already been written on that subject, so I'll stop here.

In any case, the Seminole piecing worked great, and I'll show you that next time!