Hello again! Anyone still out there?? I am attempting to blog once a week, and have a backlog of old projects I would also like to catch up on, so this is the first one. Wish me luck, and thanks for reading!
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Original inspiration fabrics |
This past winter (whoa, where has the time gone??) I signed up for my second "mini quilt swap" on Instagram. This one was hosted by someone name
SchnitzelandBoo and seems to have a lot of people participating! You get a partner and look through their Instagram account to get a feel for what they like, and then you make and send them a gift. Your partner is a secret, and it's actually a lot of fun!
I pulled the above fabrics to start with, and then stared at them for a few weeks. I really wanted to use the top one, which is a Nani Iro double gauze with cool neon dots, but I didn't have a plan other than that.
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Starting |
After looking through my partner's photos I thought I would do something that was somewhat star shaped, had a white background, and used aqua. I found a paper-piecing pattern called "Celestial Star" from a shop called
From Blank Pages. It's a cool block because depending on how you lay out the colors it can look really, really different. You can check out lots of examples on Instagram with #celestialstarqal. I eventually decided on this layout, but it wasn't easy!
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Waiting to be quilted |
The block is made up of 12 triangles that each contain 10-12 pieces so it is a lot to keep track of! It helped to use the coloring guide and cut out everything ahead of time, rather than cut as I go, which I occasionally do with paper piecing, even though it creates more waste I think.
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Quilted |
I used straight-line quilting to echo some of the shapes but kept it simple for the most part. I used aqua thread so it would stand out a little bit more.
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FInished! |
I used an older Anna Maria Horner print for the binding, and I really like it because although it has colors that arent in the quilt it still matches, or at least coordinates ( at least I think it does!). I must say that paper piecing can be really fun, and it can also be really tedious! I have to be in the right mood to do it, but I could never make enough of these blocks to equal a whole quilt. Yikes. That would be so many pieces of fabric!! But I am working on a much more simpler paper-piecing project for a large quilt for myself (when I have extra time, which is so far not at all), so we'll see how that one goes!
I have one more mini that I am finishing up for a Cotton and Steel swap, which now that I think about it also involves aqua, a circle, and white, but ah well!