Several years ago I started inexplicably collecting dragonfly patterned fabric. I don't have a particular affinity for dragonflies nor did I have a project in mind for the fabric, so its been boxed up at my mom's house awaiting an opportune project to surface. On our recent trip to South Dakota I met baby Payton Sky - who does have a particular affinity with dragonflies - and so the quilting project emerges at last.
Thanks to mom's diligent postal assistance I now have the fabric and a paper piecing pattern for dragonfly squares. First of all, I'd never heard of paper piecing before - miraculous. It's like paint-by-numbers for quilting. You literally just take scraps of fabric and sew them together on top of the actual paper pattern - no thinking required once you figure out that the piecing is kind of counter-intuitive, meaning you end up pressing the pieces into place after stitching them righ
t sides together so it takes a minute to figure out how to lay them so they press into the right places.I ended up copying the pattern by hand onto tissue paper (easier to rip off the piece once its done than regular paper - newsprint would have been the ideal weight, but I didn't have any) thus the picture of the pattern taped to the window of my new sewing studio.
After a week of obsessive paper piecing I now have a flock of seven
dragonflies, which I think is all I'm going to make since the number seven is significant in baby Payton's culture. My task now is figuring out what the rest of the quilt is going to look like and how to incorporate all these dissimilar dragonfly prints together to make something appealing.Since I'm working with regular quarter yards and fat quarters for once and not scraps I feel like I should make a regular patterned quilt, but regular patterns bore me - I like to work with things that are a
little wonky and irregular so we'll see what comes out. I am considering tacking felt up on the wall of the studio to create a design wall, but I priced felt at Longs where I found myself this morning at $6/yard and I'm too cheap to go that route, so carpet design remains the strategy of choice for now.
2 comments:
kasha, i am really into trying this paper piecing method because i have recently been really excited about quiliting something that looks like something, you know? instead of just colors and patterns... when i come visit for thanksgiving maybe you can give me a tutorial? because it looks like a little too much for me to wrap my head around via blog. also, have you been to stonemountain daughter fabrics on shattuck at dwight in berkeley? i love their selection of beautiful imported fabics as well as the more run of the mill cottons. i wish i had more money to spend there and more time to spend making quilts. especially now that i am in worcester. ha.
Bowoman! That's a big 10-4.*ksssh* on the visit! Score tix to fenway and its a done deal!
ps. still have no f'n idea where they all get "woostuh" outta Worcester... but I guess coming from a guy that can understand your kids shouting random (*naughty) things in class, i can digit.
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