Commentary about works in progress, design & creativity
I spent the weekend up on the North Coast with my handsome DH. In the car, I like to work on something. The English Paper Piecing project I started in August is perfect and I was able to finish 4 stars. A few of the stars were done during TV watching sessions.
I forgot how much I liked this project.
I organized the half hexagons in the hotel room on Saturday, so they were ready to put together in the car. It worked out great.
Each star takes around an hour to sew together.
I have made some more progress on the English Paper Piecing Project I told you about in August.
I make about one of these stars per night depending on whether I have basted the half hexagons beforehand or not.
Faye did hers with rows of light and dark stars, as I mentioned, but my plan is to use dots on white as the alternate rows. This is a long term project. It is so I have something to do in front of the television when I am out of bindings to stitch down. I don’t know if I will ever finish this quilt, but I might get sick of it and just decide to finish it once I have made thousands of the stars.
I am still kind of working out how large to cut pieces and what pieces to cut. I have decided to leave out blacks and also dark greys, though I do have a medium grey that I will leave in for the time being.
A few days ago, I gave a little sneak peek at my newest hand project.My quilter is quilting very slowly so I don’t have a lot of bindings to do and it is very hard for me to sit in front of the TV and not have something for my hands to do. There is only so much laundry a person can fold in this world.
I wasn’t really interested in doing anything using the English Paper Piecing technique until I saw my friend Faye’s stars. They look like the above stars, but hers are a bit bigger (I bought the wrong size patterns). When I saw what she was doing, I thought it might be a good project for in front of the TV, in the car, etc.
Like Faye, I bought my patterns from a company called Paper Pieces. They have GREAT customer service and a wonderful catalog that really opened my eyes to the possibilities of EPP.
TFQ is working on a hexagon paper piecing project, so when she was down, she gave me a little tutorial on how to put the pieces together. I was confused until she showed me that you sew straight through the cardstock patterns. Once I knew that everything fell into place. I also have Lisa at BAMQG and Faye via email as resources.
Faye’s piece is getting quite large. Her idea is to use darks and medium-lights in alternating rows. She said the longest row is 15 stars. I am thinking of using dots with light backgrounds as my alternate rows.
I also want to use some of my newer fabric that has not been earmarked for a project.