Contrary to popular belief among my friends, I'm still doing some traditional quilting. After completing my 4200 piece tumbling block quilt, I said I would never do another hand pieced project. Well I lied :)) Last September or so I started a hand pieced pinwheel quilt. I probably should call it my "When Hell freezes Over" quilt.
I like to hand piece using the English paper piecing method. Yes its labor intensive, but its nice and accurate. Plus its very transportable. Its the kind of project you can take anywhere you need to keep your hands busy. Welllllll - almost anywhere - if you take it to church you get all these funny looks. . . . . Go figure.
Anyways - I worked on it through out the school year whenever I had the inclination or the time or both. I would take it to school and it would set off conversations with the students on quilting and tessellating patterns. With the coming of the warm weather and dog days, it got put away.
But this week marks my return to the classroom and therefore, the pinwheels. I spent the afternoon trying to figure out where I had left off. For the first time I put the wheels up on my design board - not in any real pattern - just by value. I do want this to be a value study and I want to do it all in cool colors. From the layout I could tell that I definitely needed more mediums and lights. So off to my newly cleaned stash I went, where it was a breeze to find exactly the scraps I needed. Also from layout I can see that I have a long way to go. When I put it away it seemed like I had gotten so much accomplished. But as I found out with the tumbling block quilt, hand piecing isn't a hobby - its a vocation.
2 comments:
Oh yes, a value study! I know that method is slow but you can also take it anywhere and keep working on it.
Beautiful!! Reminds me of the Grandmother's Flower Garden I started in around 1990...it's still in process. I like what you say about not a hobby, a vocation. My husband says baseball is not a sport, it's a pastime. :) I haven't pulled out that quilt to work on in eons. Maybe it's time, since its' been in progress for almost 2 decades.
wow. That's just wrong. ;)
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