Celtic Spring Instructions

We had our first official heat wave (3 days or more over 32C) this week, so I haven't wanted to turn on the sewing machine and iron.  But it has been a great time to do some cross stitch.  Celtic Spring is progressing well:

There is a striking lack of instructions with the Celtic Spring pattern.  At the top of the key it mentions, in brackets no less, that the piece is stitched 2 over 2.  It's not clear whether the gold braid is also meant to be stitched double.  It's also not clear whether the backstitching is meant to be stitched with two strands.  In my experience, backstitching is almost always stitched with one strand.  But at the very end of the backstitching instructions it mysteriously says, again in brackets, that the gold braid backstitching should be done with one strand.  Does that mean everything else should be done double?

I decided it was open to interpretation.  I tried cross stitching the gold braid with a single strand, and it looked good to me.  I also did the backstitching under the hand and along the outer border with one strand, and that looked good to me too.

Recently, though, I have been using a new way of securing a new thread, which requires a double thickness. I'll show you that tomorrow.  I like it so much that I tried stitching the gold braid with a double strand too.  Stitching it double has pros and cons, but overall, I like it better.

When the gold braid is stitched with a single strand, it lies flush with the other stitching.  When it is stitched double it has a raised effect, which actually is pretty nice.  The amount of sparkle seems to be the same.

Changing my mind halfway through the piece is challenging, but I don't think it will be insurmountable.  The only place where the difference may show is in the side borders.  The right side border is too far gone to completely replace, but I may redo the left border.  The gold in the bodice can stay the way it is, and fortunately I hadn't done much gold in the skirt, so I have already changed that out.

I am also wondering if the backstitching around the face is meant to be stitched double.  I may try it both ways to see what looks best.

I am glad to have this decided now because it has been worrying me.  It will be easy going from here!

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.