Ooo...Pretty Colors

This was going to be a Wordless Wednesday post but I changed my mind. I can do that! My wonderful cake carrier is full of the 1930 reproduction rectangles ready to be basted around the paper pieces. Over 2000 of them. O my. This is my slow fiber project since I only work on it three times a month.

I looked for a photo of the cake carrier online but was not successful. In case you are curious, it is a rectangular shape that is about 2-3" deep and the 3/4"? lid snaps on at each short end. There are two handles on top that make transporting very, very easy. This has never held a cake only fabric!

Want to read more about this project? Check out this post: Faithful Circle Redux. This is the #7 UFO on the UFO list. There is no way it will be done soon since it is hand pieced.

Faithful Circle Redux

In 2008, I attended a small quilt show in Gunnison Colorado at the Arts Center while CarGuy attended a car show. The majority of the quilts in the show were vintage quilts from the 1930s and 1940s with a sprinkling of contemporary art quilts. I snapped a photo of this sweet quilt at that show as it was quite unusual and caught my eye.

Fast forward to 2010. I acquired a booklet of old patterns during the summer and this pattern caught my eye. It was the only pattern in the booklet that I liked so I scanned it and gave the booklet to my quilt guild’s garage sale. Then in December I did a post about the pattern and a stack of fabrics I was using to make the quilt.

I decided that the best way for me to make this quilt is using the English Paper Piecing method. So to that end, I have all the ‘papers’ cut or purchased for this quilt. Because of the size of the equilateral triangle papers purchased, I had to redraft the hexagon and my squares are now rectangles. BTW, knowing how to draft your own shapes is a handy skill to own. The pieces and parts are in their ‘to-go’ container waiting for Saturday which will be the first time I will work on it other than all the prep work. The white has not been chosen and I am waffling on fabric: plain white (like in the first photo) or a white-on-white that will work with the reproduction fabrics that will be used. Any suggestions?

I never even connected the fact that I had a photo of a completed quilt plus the pattern! That is until I was mucking around in my Flickr account and spied the first photo. Serendipity? I think so.

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.