Blue CQ

Here the piecing complete on the "blue CQ" Now, I am first to admit, I am no Allie when it comes to sewing curves, and I know this doesn't 'look' like a crazy quilt, but i am really happy with how well this has come out so far. There are a couple of piecing issues on the right side of the quilt, repeated colours in similar shapes,in neighbouring blocks, but hopefully the embellishment will cover those.

As I said previously, these are pieced together in fours, to help with continuity when stitching the seams.
I am not a technical sew-er (not sewer!!) so I thought I would show you how I pieced these blocks.

In a previous post I showed my "floorplan" for the quilt. I cut all the blocks up for piecing. Here I have my block template, and my foundation, which this time is shirt interfacing (no formfuse...arrghhhh!). It took a bit more ironing, but I think it will be nicer to sew thru, and more forgiving of any mistakes I did make. I could pull it off and try again. Anywhoo, good stuff, although 3x the price!

 

Here is my foundation over the template . I just sketched that on there.

 

Each block was numbered. I transfered that to the back of my foundation, with an arrow to indicate "up" .

  

Next I cut the template up. You can see that I marked which colour fabric would go where.

 

Piece number one cut out...

...and laid on the foundation.

 

And here is the block with all it's pieces ready for sewing. Sewing is just a matter of right sides together, and slow and steady, trying not to pull the fabric too much. There are only a couple of blocks that are noticably "pulled" due to curves on the bias. Stitching will hold them down. I also number the pieces in the order I think they should be sewn down. This block, the light middle piece went first (ironed in place), then the two mid blues, then finally the darker blue. I really only drew the lines on the foundation as a guide, they weren't followed when sewing the block  up.

So, there you go. Yay, now I get to start stitching. This will be predominantly seam treatments, although I would like an overarching (dingdingding - private joke) theme. I think it looks like a stormy sea, but I want this to be used on a bed, so do I add lots of bits and bobs with little seascape vignettes. Beno, my eldest, said it reminded him of doodleart, there may be something in that. And of course there is my leaves......I gave up the idea of tatting in this, I may have to give up the leaves too...we'll see. I also really like the idea of gathered yoyos, and the inside of the yoyo is full of beading and little surprises. If I did that and they were sewn on separately, it wouldn't effect the quilt so much in future if they "fell" off.

Lots of ideas there. If the quilt sparks anything for you, let me know. You might provide the missing link!!