3 works in progress

I'm working on three different projects at the moment, and thought I'd give you a look at each one, over a few posts. 

This first one was the last begun but the first finished. I was thinking I would intersperse working on it with the others, but it created such a mess that it took over the studio, so I just kept at it until it was done. This is from a pattern by Rachel Hauser of Stitched in Color, "Confetti." For a background fabric, I dyed some Nature's Way muslin in a pale gray that I like very much. (The color shows a little better in the detail shots below.)

I have made two "confetti" quilts long before I saw this pattern, with both of mine done improvisationally. The first was a wedding quilt made for a friend, and the second used the same idea to make "If Only," a wedding quilt for Jeremy. In contrast, Rachel Hauser's pattern utilizes paperpiecing, which pre-determines the position of scraps. I don't think I'd ever do this again, as I prefer the more spontaneous look of improvised "confetti," but that spontaneous look comes with the cost of much greater design time and mental exertion.  Much as I love doing work of my own design, I also enjoy relaxing with the simpler process of making according to someone else's design. The other appeal was that paper piecing is a technique I find challenging, and I thought this might be a good pattern for me to use to build the skill. Well, I did get better, but I made every possible mistake there is in paper piecing, most of them more than once. For those who aren't familiar with it, a little taste of what's involved: A pattern for each block is printed out on paper. (I used a translucent paper made for this purpose.) Pieces of fabric are sewn to the underside of the paper, in the order indicated by a sequence of letters.

And here's the paper turned over, showing the first pieces sewn on.

I won't try to explain anything more, except to say that because of the flipping, you need to be able to imagine everything in reverse, which is very challenging for me.  

Below are a couple of close-ups. Working with scraps is always fun, as you get to re-visit projects from the past.

There's always a hope that when doing a project with scraps, that one will work down the volume of the scraps on hand, but that never works. Going through the bins of scraps, only results in fluffing them up and creating more volume than one takes out in little pieces. To use up some more of them, I decided to make the back of the quilt entirely from large scraps, which included a few already-pieced blocks. (The top and bottom rows will be trimmed after quilting.) 

And here are a couple of photos to give you a taste of the other two projects: