Evie's quilt winging its way to Kelso

Well smug at having finished Evie's quilt and got it off before she's no longer a little baby!  I'm really pleased with the finished result, the pattern works well and is really colourful.  I'm now confident with my paper piecing and ready to launch myself onto a bigger slow growing project, beginning to put together pieces from my scrap bag and Caitlin's outgrown but much loved clothes.

Once I'd done the piecing, using Superior's fine strong Masterpiece thread, I got some cute baby dinosaur printed fleece from Letham Craft Shop near Forfar, and basted the two together using 505 spray.  I'm not sure I'll ever go back to traditional basting, it's so much easier!  In contrast to my usual method I bound the quilt before quilting as the quilting wasn't going to be directional or move the top much.  I usually do continuous binding but went for butted / knife edge binding this time and it was mostly fine, I had to unpick one edge where it hadn't caught the fleece and patchwork properly.

I found a nice old fashioned font online and reduced it to a single line.  I drew Es and Rs, Evie's initials, onto the hexagons using a green Frixion marker and hand quilted them.  Frixion markers disappear under heat and vanished beautifully after ironing, I also washed the quilt to make sure it wasn't going to come back.  To quilt I used a favourite quilting thread, Superior's King Tut in Mummies.  This is a thread I've used for several baby quilts and has a lovely repeat of pastel yellow, blue and pink.  I did originally try my hand at free machine quilting but wasn't happy with the result so unpicked and went for hand quilting, which gave a really lovely line.

So finally back to the knitting.  Between this and having lost over a stone after taking control of my eating and exercise, and becoming stronger and more flexible during yoga, it's been a good week.  Now all we need is for the weather to cooperate, here in Scotland seedlings are still having to be in the school bottle greenhouse, we might run out of space soon!

Paper piecing for little toes

Drawing out diamonds onto freezer paper

Am loving doing my first paper pieced quilt, a baby one mind!  I have long been inspired by Lucy Boston's work, and the sorrowful memory of giving up on a Grandmother's Flower Garden piece when I was younger. I pleasantly agonised over my choice of fabrics for Evie's quilt, it gave me the perfect excuse to browse and buy at the trader's hall at the Quilters' Guild AGM in Dundee.  I'm glad I took the time, I'm very happy with the soft eastery yellow and bright yet not too bright fabrics that go with it.  The orange is actually left over from Isabel's quilt but goes just perfectly.  My plan is to eventually make a larger quilt with smaller patches for myself / the house from my box of hoarded scraps and daughter's outgrown clothes, a memory quilt in the style of Tolly's grandmother in Lucy Boston's The Chimneys of Green Knowe.

I'm using freezer paper for my patches.  Personally I've found it far and away the best thing to use for paper piecing because it sticks to the back of the fabric when ironed on and so stays neatly in place while you're tacking the patch down.

First trial of pieces

How to create my templates took me a while to figure out, messing around with printers, but far and away the most economical way to use the freezer paper to get the maximum number of templates was to draw them out myself.  Cue some work with 60 and 120 degree angles and a soothing time spent cutting out templates, and some questions as to how a parallel line can 'move'.

I ironed a few paper pieces on to my fabrics making sure they were at least half an inch apart, then cut them out giving myself at least a quarter of an inch all round to turn over.  Once I'd tacked a few I laid them out to get an idea of how many I was going to need, and then I worked out all the fiddly half hexagons and half and quarter diamonds I was going to need for the edges.  

Final design

I always knew the design was going to be stars and hexagons, but I didn't know how I was going to assemble the diamonds into stars and how big the stars and hexagons were going to come out.  I had thought random would be fine, but then looking at it decided on expanding concentric 'circles' of each kind of star and to match the orange with the green and the blue with the white.  The green stripe was slightly fussy cut in that I decided to keep the stripes lengthways, but this was the direction of the weave.

I broke out the isometric paper and drew out what I had already (coloured in shapes, left).  To keep the pattern right I worked it out beyond the edges of the quilt (unfilled shapes, left) and could then just count how many setting edge pieces I was going to need of each colour.  I had to make the white patches black because my brain just couldn't cope with remembering which ones should be white!

Paper piecing is the ultimate take along sewing, the tacking was done on the train to and from Stirling, and even kept me occupied on a cold Perth station platform as the snow came down.   Piecing is now taking place in front of the tv under a duvet as the Scottish 'spring' flexes its claws, and it's growing fast.  All I have to figure out now is how to bind the quilt and back it.  I'm thinking knife edge binding, it will be a new thing for me, I've always done continuous binding before.  And I might just do tied / knotted quilting rather than continuous.  No more babies please!

And finally ... catching up with the Sampler Quilt

9. Clamshell
Ironing fabric onto freezer paper as with Inner City, but this time the pieces are curved, technically more challenging but looks good, and they are appliqued down like roof tiles rather than pieced.  This gave me a chance to use a nice colour changing piece of ikat as the background and some of the smaller scraps of the Naturescapes fabric used carefully to complement the changing colours of the ikat as well as a new toning fabric.  Looked lovely when I created it as it was and then even better when it was quilted and the shells really stand out.