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.

My Bucket List

 

 Key West is a town with multiple personalities.

There are personalities that I love and those that I don't. There is warm weather, lots of art galleries, lots of restaurants and beautiful scenery.  There are also lots of bars and lots of t-shirt shops.  

This is one of the cleaner t-shirts that I have seen on one of my morning walks, so I had a good laugh one morning when I saw this t-shirt in a shop window.  

 It was perfect because I am working on one of the quilts on my bucket list. 

One of the quilts on my bucket list is Storm At Sea. I want to make it out of silk dupioni. It is created with triangles, squares and rectangles, but has the illusion of curves. Storm at Sea presents its own challenges due to color placement leading to a variety of designs.  I looked around on Pinterest to help me choose which color placement to choose.  Here's a LINK.

I decided to paper piece the blocks.  I used the pattern that was provided at Quilter's Cache. 

The pattern is composed of 3 different blocks.

Here is my favorite paper piecing tip when you need to make your own paper foundation.

You will need newsprint and a stapler. 

(I love that stapler.  It is very special to me because it was my Dad's from his office.)

I use newsprint because it is easy to remove. 

Print out one copy of the pattern and then fold the paper so that it is larger then the pattern.  

Staple in a few places.

With an unthreaded sewing machine and a basting stitch, sew around all of the lines perforating the paper as you go.

Remove the staples and separate the patterns.

Lots of paper foundations ready to stitch.

Here are a bunch of the blocks on my design all.  

I made them with silk dupioni.

It's hard to see the movement.

I think and hope once the blocks are put together, there will be a flow.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Do you have a quilt Bucket List?