March: finished project

March: finished project by daria

March 31, 2008, 9:13 pm
Filed under: Daria, finished | Tags: finished, March

Dear Blair,

This has been done for a couple of days, but the surprise March sleet has been interfering with my photo light for the surprise March color pairing, ahem.  Plus, I had to sit around thinking about how much I love your project before I could post about mine.  I love it!

Ok, so, I took the fabrics you sent, added a handful of solid cottons from my scrap box, & gave foundation piecing a whirl.  I’m not sure it’s a technique that will become part of my standard toolbox (not like the paper bag trick you used, which I’m dying to try), but I will say that it was very easy to handle some pretty fiddly little bits of fabric this way.  I used my rotary cutter to slice the fabric up into little freehand strips, then sewed them down to a muslin backing (more pics on flickr), & while the end result is thicker & lumpier (seamwise, I mean) than I would want in many cases, it was a lot of fun for this little project.

I initially made three strips, but felt like the piece needed something more, so I cut each of those in half the long way & sewed everything back together.  I added a few embellishments with the felt & ric rac you included in the box, then decided that this was the perfect opportunity to test out the square loop quilting design I’ve been working out.

Of course, with all the extra seaming & then the fairly heavy quilting, I came up short on size, so I decided to add a scrap of the uneven foundation-pieced ends across the bottom, since that skyline effect was actually one of my favorite results of the technique.  I ended up having to trim off most of the interesting bits when I cut the piece down to size (bad planning = making the piece too large & having important sections, pre-trimming, at both top & bottom).  Still, it’s something I’ll remember about doing strips that way.

I absolutely agree with you, the size & scope of these projects makes them feel very manageable, a perfect little way to try out new ideas or new techniques.  (I do really wish I could find my notebook, though.)

D

*As usual, I posted larger images than usual for the big reveal but looks like our template cuts off the sides so be sure to click the pictures for full size or check them out on the 8×8 flickr.

11 Comments

11 Comments so far
Leave a comment

RSS feed for comments on this post.