Hello everyone! How have you been? We've just finished half term which was lovely but hectic with the Smalls. I so enjoyed my peaceful cuppa when I came home from the school run this morning, soooo relaxing! I did manage some slow sewing over the past week though and thought I would share some of my processes with you, just in case you're interested! I started out by cutting enough pieces for about 4 blocks: choosing fabrics is always the bit that takes me the longest so I like to play with different selections of fabric over a few days until I'm happy with my combinations. Then each of the block pieces were put together in their own ziplock bag, ready for the next stage.......
Marking up for hand piecing is the bit I'm finding trickiest
(read boring!) at the moment! I don't trust myself to be able to eyeball the seam allowances well enough though so I'm going to keep persevering and am trying to embrace the whole process. A while ago I made myself a design board using
Lori's fabulous tutorial and on the reverse side I stuck a sheet of sandpaper (this is a trick that I picked up from the lovely
Jen Kingwell: if you lay fabric on the sandpaper it doesn't shift around whilst your trying to draw the seam allowances on). My board measures around 9" x 10.5" and is the perfect size for holding 6 small pieces at a time. First I mark each of the dots on the template using either a silver gel/frixion pen (depending on the colour of the fabric). For this diamond, I can then move the template down the shape slightly to match up three of the corner points (as pictured) and draw on my sewing line. I repeat this for the other 5 shapes then pick up the board, rotate it 180* and repeat the process. The sandpaper is so good at gripping the paper that I found the easiest way is to just tip the board upside down so that all the pieces come off! Then they all go back into the ziplock bag so that I have a project bag ready to go!
It did take a while to get my mini project bags all prepped and ready to go but I'm now set for a few weeks of slow sewing! And here are the blocks that I've completed so far....two Large Hexagon 1's and one Small Hexagon 3.
I hope this has been of interest to some you and if you have any other tips to share with me for hand-piecing, I'd really love to hear them!
Sx
Today's sky ● blue skies and cloudy. Could almost feel spring in the air today!
Labels: patchwork quilting, sewing, tips
