Happy Tuesday, everyone!

Friday was the last day of school for my kids, so I haven’t been sewing nearly as much as I’d like to be. Here’s what I’ve got going on this week:

I finished the baby quilt for my friend’s shower, but I was sick and unable to go to the party. 😦 The quilt is all wrapped up and waiting til I see her next.

I’m plugging away at Ryan’s quilt. The compass stars take a long time to complete, so I’ve been breaking up the monotony by chain piecing borders. I’m planning on improvising the border pieces, alternating some complicated piecing with plain, solid borders. I’m getting to the point where I need to start thinking about a possible backing for this one. This Alison Glass print would be perfect, but I think it’s a little too purple. I’ll probably bring the top to my LQS in the next few weeks and compare the two.

Here is my current hand piecing project. The pattern is called Windows Into My World by Geta Grama, and is pretty amazing. She has some of the best modern quilt patterns out there! This is a project that I started over a year ago, then set aside for a while. Now I keep it along with a small sewing kit in a 2-gallon Ziploc that I grab whenever I’m heading somewhere that I might be able to sew…. usually my daughters Tae Kwon Do class. In fact, I’ve joked that I need to rename this “My Tae Kwon Do Quilt”.

Here are some things I’ve learned during this project:

1) For me, glue basting and English Paper Piecing do not mix. I originally glue basted these and because if the shape of the pieces, there was some slipping that happened and things got a bit messed up. I went back and thread basted the crap out of all the pieces that hadn’t been sewn together yet and everything’s going much nicer! That being said, I’ve done ok glue basting hexies before, but I think we all just have our own preferences.

2) When you’re learning to EPP and they tell you to ‘take a tiny bite’ of the fabric…. there is such a thing as too tiny of a ‘bite’! I found that taking super small amounts of fabric (like 2-3 threads) was slowing my way down and actually making my stitches show. It may be because I am using some cheaper fabric for this project, but those few threads that I had grabbed were pulling loose rather than bringing the rest of the fabric close into the stitch with them. Once I figured out to grab more of that fabric, I was faster (not concentrating so hard on getting ‘tiny bites’) and my stitches nearly disappeared.

I hope you all are having a wonderful week of quilty fun. This week, I’m linking up to: