Wednesday - a bit of progress

I am happy to have some work in progress today. On Tuesday night I was hand stitching the binding onto my Across the Sea QAL quilt. My version of this quilt has a Kona Charcoal background and back and the plus blocks are made from various Kaffe Fassett and other similar bright fabrics. Finishing the binding is slow and calm work. I should be done this one by the end of the weekend.



I spent Sunday free motion quilting it on my sewing machine. You can see that I tried an all over rounded corner squarish motif - I like to think of these imperfect squares as having a 70's vibe. This is my first attempt at this motif - it was reasonably easy to do. I used King Tut thread in a variegated dark colour called obsidian. This quilt will finish at about 60" x 72" and I can't wait to see how it looks after it is washed.



That star is part of a new mini quilt called Twinkle. It is also the first ever paper pieced  pattern that I drew myself. I started out with the idea for Twinkle - a fancy but small star on Kona Charcoal, quilted to be similar in style to Shattered and Shine. I just needed to find the perfect star and since I could not I took another approach.

On the recommendation of Lynne at Lily's Quilts, I loaded Touchdraw onto my ipad and in the spirit of "how hard can it be", on Saturday I drew the star, printed it and set about figuring out how to paper piece it. 

Well, it seems that it can be a lot harder than it looks to just make up your own pattern. The tricky part of paper piecing design so far for me is that you have to divide the project up into parts that can be pieced at once and then the parts are sewn together - hopefully with easy seams. I learned that this fairly simple looking star had to be made in 16 separate parts. And joining the tricky bias cuts so the seams matched was also not easy. I learned a great deal making this star. 

And worse, I did not even chose fabrics to show off all its paper piecing difficulty, as I was going for more of a twinkling quality. But I am pretty happy with how it turned out.

So here is Twinkle. It is a mini quilt which is about 15" x 16.75". I know there are a great number of spectacular mini quilts about the internet right now - especially at the Modern Mini Quilt Challenge (oh and if you have not yet done so, go over and vote on the finalists in the people's choice award by clicking here.) However, I was inspired to make Twinkle anyway, and there are a few others that still might have to be made before the inspirations that came along as a result of Shattered are finished.

So on the progress report is to continue to work through my mini quilt ideas. Also, as soon as I finish the binding on the ATS quilt, I am hoping to get back to the borders on the Mystery Quilt. I also have a couple more swaps to get moving on, and some packages to pack up and mail. Progress on all my projects is being made, but I also have to admit to having a great desire to start a new quilt or two, it is hard to stay on one thing it seems.

I am linking this progress report to Lee at Freshly Pieced's WIP Wednesday and also with the Canadians at the Needle and Thread Network. The buttons are over on the right sidebar. There are always wonderful projects posted at each of these links, I hope you have time to visit them.

Best,

Leanne