Thursday, April 15, 2010

Paper pieced quilt







                                                                                                 The craft group I belong to at St. Margaret's in the Pines usually make a quilt every couple of years for a raffle. We bagan this one last year.  This star design uses pieces of paper marked in triangles with cutting lines and sewing lines.  This is Susan, our fearless leader who knows all about quilts, quilting, sewing machines, and is a great resource for the rest of us who only have a very limited knowledge of all of the above.







The fabric for this quilt came from the stash of one of our dear friends who passed away and left a wonderful assortment of colourful cottons.  So, as well as being an interesting, vibrant quilt to work on, it is a joy to make.






We began this last year and have diligently sewn block by block, week by week (with a few weeks time out to make Easter eggs), and now finally, we have enough blocks to put it together.   For a non-sane-quilter (as opposed to a crazy quilter), it was very uncomplicated to do.  Susan divided the fabrics first into colours, then within the colours were "lights", "mediums" and "darks".    She cut the fabric into strips and then placed two different right sides together and pinned thm to the paper for us to sew.  It seemed like magic the way it worked, but of course it's not.  The paper pieces are called "Thangles" (  http://www.thangles.com/howtheywork.html ) and would inspire me to tackle a quilt with so many points to match, without a second thought.






The first photo shows one finished block sewn together, and one just stuck to a piece of flannelette before sewing. 









The next photo is the blocks all laid out on our working table to get the same design from the pattern we used.





And the third photo is one finished block to show all the different patterned pieces and how the dark triangles make up the star.






This past week I sewed together the first row of blocks.  I'm sure next week we will have sewn it all together ready for the border.  More photos next week!