Paper piecing is great for beginner quilters

I taught my first quilt class last Saturday on paper piecing.

I love this quilting method because it allows you to get really sharp points without templates or insanely accurate quarter-inch seams. It's kind of like sewing by numbers and its really easy once you get the hang of it.

I was teaching the class because I'm in charge of designing a tree for the Festival of Trees. It's going to be filled with ornaments made from fabric. The hope is that if more people know how to make paper pieced Christmas ornaments, hopefully I won't have to make them all myself this November.

Here's the blocks my students came up with. They did a great job for beginners.

 

 

It's Christmas in my mailbox

I'm the lead designer for the Mississippi Valley Quilters Guild Christmas tree for the Festival of Trees this year.

For those of you who aren't in the Quad-Cities, the Festival of Trees is a fundraiser for Quad-City Arts in which artists design Christmas trees, stockings, wreaths, hearths and entire rooms with Christmas decorations of their own creation. Then the Christmas decorations are auctioned off to benefit arts programing in the Quad-Cities.

Part of my duties include making a Christmas tree skirt. Quilting By-You, LLC., is the benefactor for the tree, and co-owner Charlene Thode suggested Judy Niemeyer's Christmas Celebration Tree Skirt pattern. I loved it and today it arrived in my mailbox.

I'm so excited to dig into all these paper pieced points and curved seams. I know, I'm a gluten for punishment.

Completed project: Over sized messenger bag

My sister is a teacher and has a lot of papers and binders to carry back and forth each day.

So she asked me to make her a quilted over sized messenger bag that was functional and stylish.


I designed the bag above to fit her needs. It's 14 inches wide, 12 inches tall and 6 inches deep to fit all her binders and paper. There are two side pockets and one on the interior to fit her keys, pencils, pens and any other odds and ends she may have.


The strap is 3 inches wide, which I recommended so it wouldn't strain her shoulders. But it took me forever to find hardware for a 3 inch wide strap so it could be adjustable. Eventually I ended up using a piece made for a belt.

The entire bag is quilted in a diagonal grid, and I quilted in the ditch on the quilt block on the flap panel. I used a paper pieced design to make it look a little more modern, since my sister is in her early 20s.

My sister picked out the colors when we went on a shopping trip together to a quilt store near her home. And now it's finished just in time for her to start the school year in a couple weeks.

An afternoon with Carol Doak

It's been a crazy month since my class with Carol Doak, and most of it was spent without Internet at home. I don't know what I would have done without my Blackberry.


Carol was a great teacher, she made paper piecing very easy although it's not fool-proof. I cut through the paper pattern a couple of times during class. The picture above is of me at the class, Carol took it. :)

We were lucky enough to see several of her paper pieced quilts, including one that has 300 paper pieced blocks in it.


Since the class I've made one of her paper pieced heart blocks to serve as my name tag at the Mississippi Valley Quilt Guild and I'm almost done piecing the top to the wall hanging we started during class.