Weekend Work

Tarts 3/3/2009

I worked on the Tarts on Sunday. I dragged myself  to the machine and was resigned to a miserable afternoon. I am pleased to report that I  had a good experience with Machine Applique’ and could barely tear myself away to attend to life. So, I think I will be able to move on with this project. I am only committing to one more block ;-), but it is a start.

As I mentioned previously, I was working on the cake block below. You can see the blank block in a previous post. It sat on the wall glaring at me and taunting me while I worked on the pattern. I fiddled and moved things around quite a bit before I got an arrangement that I liked. The pattern took me a long time to get right.

Cake block pattern
Cake block pattern

You may think that this is a strange way to make a pattern or that I went to an architectural copy place and had them make one of those blue architectural drawing copies.  Actually, it is just pencil on white sketch paper. It was hard to photograph and, thus, very hard to see no the screen so I inverted it so you could see it better.

I plan to do a post on my machine applique’ process sometime later.

I did find the machine applique’ process to be quite fiddly. I have been in a piecing frame of mind for so long that it took me awhile to get into the groove.  Once I got the pieces cut and was satin stitching, I found it to be a pleasant process. I liked the puzzle aspect of figuring out which piece went on first and what line should be stitched over, etc. I was also able to try Steam-A-Seam Lite and Steam-A-Seam Lite 2 for the first time. I liked the results! I am pretty pleased with how the block turned out.

As I stitched, I got an idea for the block for the upper left hand corner. As soon as I had a free moment I worked on that design as well.  Stay tuned!

Cake block detail