Cameo Carnival

I'm really enjoying puttering along with my EPP. Now that I have made the 'pattern' I'm trying to decide what to do to square it up because I have decided to make this into a cushion.  I'm not sure I love the idea of trying to applique it onto a base fabric (not a lot of faith in my ability to do this neatly) so I'm thinking of filling in around the pattern with more dark blue pieces until it is big enough for me to square off. Is there an option 'C' I haven't thought of?

Quilting

I have started quilting my quilt 'Peaks'. I decided to try some 505 basting spray which I haven't used before - mostly as practice because I want to quilt some voile fabric. I'm not sure how readily available this spray is in NZ - I got this can from Helen but sadly her shop is closing. For any local readers Fabricland in Papakura stock it at the moment.

 It's really good! I basted the quilt on my cousin's large wooden kitchen floor. As far as I could tell, not too much overspray stickiness but as I haven't had to live with the kitchen floor post-basting I can't absolutely guarantee 'no mess'. Hopefully if there was a mess the children got the blame ;-)
I pin basted as well - I don't mind pinning at all and this quilt is quite big so I did it to be on the safe side.  I think on a smaller quilt you could get away without pinning at all.

I also finished up Mel's bee block - a pod. Her blocks will look amazing when they are all together - pods seem to be all the rage at the moment.

'Trees please'

Karyn asked for tree blocks for her Monday Modern block. She was very minimalist with instructions - a tree or trees in a 12.5" block. I'm  hopeless at improvising so I looked around and found a cute little paper piecing pattern here.

I love the Echino fabric she gave us - I couldn't resist sneaking in a bit of the purple from the selvedge - it is such a lovely colour.

English Paper Piecing

I have been working on my not-so-secret quilt slowly but surely - but as I am just five weeks away from handing in the first draft of my completed thesis (gulp), time at the sewing machine is limited. Here is a sneak peek.

I have been admiring various EPP projects for ages now. Karyn's hexies, Katy's Spring Carnival cushion and also this latest project she is working on. I really like hand stitching so figured some EPP would be a great way to unwind in the evenings. I decided on making Katy's Spring Carnival cushion, because she has a great tutorial available and you can print out all the paper pieces. I made the first block with paper from my printer but it is hard to get nice firm edges and with the different shapes I find the pieces need to be really accurate. I decided to buy some online (too lazy and pushed for time to buy thicker paper and fluff around cutting them out). I'm really happy with these papers -they are firm and work well with the glue, and they seemed to find their way to NZ very quickly.