Faithful Circle

Every two weeks I meet with like-minded ladies in the church hall to work on UFO projects. I mainly do handwork projects because I'm currently not into schlepping the sewing machine and miscellaneous stuff back and forth. As a further consideration, the lighting in the hall is poor and because of this, hand applique is out of the equation. In the past knitting and embroidery have been the projects of choice, alternating weeks of each so as not to get bored with the project. The embroidered blocks in the Hallowe'en quilt are finished, and knitting has been the hand work project for the last several meetings.

Now, awhile back I did a bit of stunt knitting for Libby, and as a thank you, she sent me this wonderful stack of 1930s reproduction FQ. It has been sitting on the cutting table teasing me, begging to be used. In a Eureka! moment, I remembered a pattern I had saved from an old booklet; a pattern called Faithful Circle that involves rectangles, equilateral triangles and hexagons.

Knowing that this will be a hand work project, conversations with myself about how to proceed with this pattern have abounded. The pattern page (yes, there is only one) has the three aforementioned pieces as templates. And if one were to follow the size recommendations, the quilt would be about 90x109!! Gigantic. Huge.

English paper piecing is the path I am going to take to piece this quilt. Looking online, I found a source for the needed equilateral triangles. But instead of 1.75" on a side the choice was 1.5" or 2". The smaller size was placed into the shopping cart and buttons were pushed to take advantage of the free shipping on Black Friday.

The template hexagon was now too big and needed to be redrafted in the new size. I redrafted the hexagon to the needed size: 2.67" per side and made one template. Easy peasy, lemon squeasy. I traced around the resulting template onto index card stock, two per page (or in the illustration lingo: two up) and spent ensuing evenings cutting out largish hexagons. How many you may ask? over 100. O my kingdom for a die cutter!

Next came the thousands of rectangles. You know what helped? The June Taylor Shape Cut. Yes, I actually used quilting tools for this part of the project. Thirty-three sheets of card stock later, the needed quantity of rectangles were cut with a minimum of fuss.

Next came cutting into the fabric. Cute little pieces of fabric. The FQ stack has been cut into thousands of 1.5x2" rectangles. I added some other 30s repro fabric that just happened to be laying around the sewing room. Once again, the Shape Cut made quick work of cutting the rectangles.  I have a niggly feeling that I will be adding to these fabrics. As I was cutting, I realized that there was no purple. No purple? I need to remedy that problem.

Cleaning out the kitchen cupboards resulted in a to-go box of paper and fabric shapes to make a quilt called Faithful Circle. Definitely a long term project.