Thursday, January 8, 2015

The Top Is Done

In my previous post, I shared the beginnings of my silk dupioni Storm At Sea quilt.  I have been sewing away. I finished it today.  It has been an up and down journey - a love and hate affair.

It has taken me much longer than I expected.  Why is it when you are nearing the finish line, so many things can go wrong?
This layout was in my last post.  I took my time putting it together.  The paper makes it difficult to piece the blocks together.  They slip. To get the most precise points, I baste them together first with the longest machine stitch on my machine.  Then I go in and make adjustments, if necessary, by removing a section of the basting stitches.

This is how the main body turned out:
The patterns in the design really are starting to show now. Can you see the curved lines?

There are several options for finishing and I chose one that would accentuate one of the patterns:
I really love this layout.  It really accentuates the curved medallion,but OOPS!,  do you see my mistake in the upper left corner?  Ratz! So I ripped and fixed and added the outer borders. Some very naughty words came out of my mouth as I realized I put one border on wrong side out and then when I went to rip it out, I realized I took off the wrong border.  But finally the top is done.  Yay!
I added the skinny colored border using scraps.  It added just a little pop of color.
This is what tge back looked like when I was finished .  The papers are all a bit ragged at this point.
I shorten the stitch length when stitching to the newsprint paper foundation.  
This helps the paper to come off easily.

My set up here isn't conducive to quilting, so I will roll it up onto one of those swim noodles and try to come up with a plan to quilt it when I return to PA.

In the meantime, if you haven't done any paperpiecing and would like to try, I designed a simple little birdhouse quilt a bunch of years ago.  You can get the free pattern  HERE.
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7 comments:

  1. It came out so beautiful! Can't wait to see it quilted!

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  2. Gorgeous, simply gorgeous! It seems like everyone stitches the blocks together with the papers on. I did that on my Storm at Sea (my very first paper pieced project), and there was so much bulk that I had a hard time getting everything to line up. I thought I had made a mistake by not removing the papers before I sewed the blocks together. Why didn't I think about machine basting the blocks together? Duh!

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  3. I just love it....what a beautiful SAS!

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  4. The difference between your first shot and the finished shot is nothing short of remarkable. I'm a convert to machine basting!

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