Hi Everybody,

It’s been a while since I posted because I have been out gardening in our lovely weather. Now we are back to rain, rain, rain, it’s a good time to let the garden take care of itself and sew, sew, sew.

I had a friend once that worked for an American company and was always coming up with new sayings he had heard at work. One of them was to ‘run something up the flagpole’, or just give something a try. I love the idea of metaphorically offering something to the winds and letting it unfurl, even if it has to come down again. So this post is about new experiments; giving one or two more unusual things a try.

About a year ago I bought some fabric panels from a line called ‘The Sweet Life’ by the designer Cori Dantini.

I’m not a great fan of panels because it feel like some of the work has been done for you, but I wanted to experiment with how big I could go with English Paper Piecing. Would the technique still work using very large pieces of paper? And if I had to butt several pieces together would the block be stable enough to keep its shape?   I also wanted to make a quilt that could be seen from all sides. Perhaps panels could be used effectively in this way. I laid the panels out on the carpet to see how it would look:

I chose a co-ordinating piece for the back of the quilt, made up of similar, smaller panels, and auditioned some fabrics for the centre square. At first I thought I would use the blue floral design but opted for the green stripe because it blended in better and because it was called ‘Field of Joy’.

I didn’t have any very large pieces of paper, so I used three overlapping sheets of A4 paper stapled together, slightly smaller than the panels, and basted the fabric over the paper.

Then I sewed them together, sewing the centre square last. Unfortunately I attached the last panel facing the wrong way.  Can you see, the two girls with wings are facing the same way?

I left the quilt like that for over a week while I wondered whether to leave it alone, or unpick the panel and reverse it. Eventually, I decided to unpick it and change it, for two main reasons: 1) If it was to face this way, it would make sense for the two panels that have writing on to be facing you but they were sideways on, so you couldn’t read them easily. 2) This  started out as an experiment with a ’round and round’ design. If I left it this way then every time I looked at it I would be disappointed that I didn’t do that, that it didn’t work out. The mistake would shout at me. So I unpicked the panel, put the paper piece back in, re-basted the edges and re-sewed it on the right way. It seemed to take AGES. The other paper panels had been taken out (I didn’t want to have to put them all back in, so it lacked some stability which meant going slow). However, the good news is yes, the English Paper Piecing technique is do-able with large pieces of paper, just as it is with small ones.

Then I ran something else up the flagpole: I decided to embroider some of the surface design before I quilted the panels. I knew this would make the quilt totally impractical buy hey, this is about learning and have fun. I didn’t want to go too crazy or the stitches would interfere with the quilting, so I decided to embroider the girls hair and eyes and embellish their dresses a little. What a fun way this is to practice stitches! I can see myself doing much more of this surface stitching on fabric.

Now it’s time to sew the front and back together with a piece of cotton batting in between and start quilting. In the first picture above you can see I have drawn some turquoise parallel lines across the panel. These are to guide my quilting stitches and will wash out afterwards. In another post, I’ll let you know how it all turns out.

I am also experimenting with a small piece using fabric paint, applique and surface embroidery. More of that next time too….