finished quilt top and paper patch fun

Yay, I finished pieceing my Star Wars Rainbow Star quilt top.  But I'm only going to give you a little sneak peak of it, I'm not going to show you a picture of the whole thing. Because its soon-to-be owners read this blog, and I don't want it to be all "ho hum, we've already seen it before", when they finally get it. I mean, they obviously have a pretty good idea of it from all I've posted already, but I want there to be at least a bit of a surprise for them. 

I noticed, as I laid it out on the dining room floor to take a few pictures, how sweetly it matches our toys. (Awesome wooden pattern toy courtesy of Auntie Cynthia, purchase from Citizen Kid in Hamilton I think...)

I will show you the back though. Doesn't that look cool? Sometimes I love the back of things almost as much as the front. This is made with a paper template piecing method (not to be confused with English Paper pieceing). With this method, you actually sew the patches onto the paper, which stableizes them a lot for the whole getting the points to line up and dealing with the bias grain side of the triangles. Its very handy, and makes for some good accurate piecing. I used a mix of plain old copier paper and also pages out of the phone book. Because it occured to me that the copier paper might be just a titch heavy and the phone book paper might be easier to remove when all was said and done. I scanned the template (from a Kaffe Fassett book, the name of which escapes me at this moment, ah its Kaffe Fassett's Quilts en Provence I think. Thank you internets.) and then printed these off on my printer. The phone book paper jammed in the printer, like, every fourth time which is why I have much fewer of those. Also, I did not have an old phone book, but was instead pillaging pages from our current phone book, so I had to be choosy about pages we might not need in the future. Thank goodness the blue pages are bilingual. Don't really need two sets of those. 

Anyhow, now its just rip, rip, rip, time to take the papers off the back. Its a bit trickier and more time consuming than I thought. Sure the sewing machine needle kind of perforates the paper, but even though, its takes quite a bit of effort and some fine work with the tweezers to get all the little bits out of the seam allowance overlap areas at the points. 

Luckily I had a helper. 

He was surprisingly tenacious, and stuck with it for quite awhile. I only let him do the telephone paper patches, as they came away much more easily so there was less chance that he'd stress the seams. And he wasn't so interested in getting all the last little picky bits, but he was vert helpful nonetheless.

Right, I've got to go and do some more ripping before bed. Its not the funnest part of quilting, but there is something sort of satisfying about it, like tweezing your eyebrows or popping zits. You know what I mean.


 

 

Comments

[Marcia Van Drunen]

popping zits.
oh, you make me smile, girl, you make me smile!
enjoy your quilting project! someone is going to get a one-of-a-kind piece of love and art

[Kathryn]

I love it! I haven't cut into my stash of Star Wars sheets yet...too nervous, but this is amazing!