Last weekend I got started on a wedding quilt for a friend of my husband who is getting married in July. I'm using a pattern from Me? A Mom? and adapting it slightly. The pattern is her Urban Lattice, and I have shrunk the blocks so they are 6" finished instead of 12", and adjusted the widths of each strip accordingly. The pattern uses pretty simple paper piecing, really a slight extension of a string block, but I've been struggling with it. Because my sewing budget is tight, I worry about wasting fabric, and so I always end up cutting my pieces too small for the paper piecing process. I started cutting last Saturday and cut just a few pieces of each color so I could make a few test blocks, and sure enough, not only had I cut my pieces too small, I had mis-calculated the size I actually needed. Oh well, at least I have decided to use all scraps (or as many as I can) in some kind of patchwork on the back of the quilt.
One of the quilt shops near me offered a paper piecing class this past weekend, but I just couldn't manage to take it, instead I worked on my economics final. You can probably guess which I would have rather been doing! I think I'm at the point where I have given paper piecing a good go on my own, and if I'm ever going to be successful at it I will need someone who knows what they are doing to help me. Luckily the class will be offered again in April, so I'm hoping to take it then.
I did take a short sewing break this weekend, between economics problems, to make a cute little drawstring bag. We have a cat and a dog at our house, and they give off an ungodly amount of fur. I have determined that if I want to keep anything fur-free, it has to be in isolated confinement, so I attempted a little bag using a modified pillowcase model. I also figured that it would be somewhat silly to be protecting things from fur by putting them into a bag with raw seams, only to have them come out covered in fabric fuzz. This motivated me to try out french seams for the first time. If you're not familiar with them, they are entirely contained seams, no raw edges are exposed. I think they look nice in my little bag! I had some trouble figuring out how to keep openings for the drawstrings and do the french seams on all exposed edges, but I managed it with a little bit of cheating. The bag used just one fat quarter folded in half, and about 2' of ribbon I've had stashed away looking for a project. I think it turned out quite well and I'll see if I can get a picture of it up here sometime this week.
I don't really know how some of the ladies out there in the blog world manage to post several entries per week with lots of photos and new projects. I feel like I barely have time to sit down to DO a little project, much less plan out taking pictures of each step, the final product, and loading it all into Blogger and composing an eloquent post about it! I suppose it might be easier for those stay-at-home-moms to find a few minutes here and there throughout the day to dedicate to their blog. Maybe someday when I'm not in school and working I'll be able to produce more visually stimulating and inspiring posts. Until then, text-heavy it will be!
