Sunday, November 11, 2012
Some Flickr photos from Seaside Stitches inspired this circle-of-geese-within-a-circle-of-geese mini quilt block which I then hung on the wall. For kicks.
For my first experience with foundation paper piecing, my piecing is so-so. I really should have been more liberal with the sizes of fabric I cut. Maybe next time. There are two glaringly gigantic errors that bother me, but the average person won't ever look that closely (this is a saving grace with most arts & crafts).
1. Printing Out the Pattern
You'll need three copies of Piece by Number's Colorwheel Geese (pretty much the pattern used around the internetz). Make sure to choose a single direction (clockwise vs. counterclockwise) and when printing do not do any scaling. "Scale to fit page" or whatever is not desirable here.
You'll also need four copies of the same pattern, but printed at 25% the size. For the miniature pattern pieces, you'll need to redraw the border around the pieces to 1/4". Scaling down by 25% also happens to scale down this seam allowance, which is no good.
2. Follow the Pattern's Instructions
Assemble the mini circle first, and then incorporate it into the larger circle of geese. If this is your first time foundation paper piecing, a photo tutorial likes this one from Chasing Cottons might be handy.
3. Quilting
Since this was a mini-quilt, I omitted any batting and this made attaching the binding a seriously annoying task. I think next time, I'd use a piece of felt for batting.
I followed the quilting design from Canoe Ridge Creations by basically just echoing the outline of the geese triangles.
4. Binding
As usual, I followed the quilt binding instructions from Crazy Mom Quilts and/or Heather Bailey.
For hand-sewing the binding to the backing, I had to take extra care to check that my stitches weren't showing through in the front (this is where batting would have been useful). Also, while hand-stitching the binding, I decided to add in 3 little loops so that I could thread a bamboo skewer through them and hang the mini quilt on the wall.
Done!
Linking to Sew Modern Monday.
5 comments:
I received this block as a bee block in one of the rounds of the 4x5 Bee on Flickr. It's such a fun block!
Sweet little mini! Well done on your first go at paper piecing - it looks great! I've been paper piecing for a little while and I still sometimes misjudge the size of the fabric pieces ;)
Love it! And I really love your gallery wall!
you are way cooler than I am. just thought I should put that out there.
The quilt looks amazing up on that wall - I LOVE The wall!
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