textile dreams – fibery wake up

I just realized that I haven’t posted anything in almost 3 weeks. That doesn’t mean nothing’s going on here, on the contrary. I’ve started working on the quilt I showed the basic design of in my last post, so there’s lots of sewing going on, just not much to see. But there are a few things I can show: before I decided to go ahead with this design, I did a small sample just to figure out how feasible it would be to actually sew this:

The small red triangles have a side length of 1 cm, so the whole thing is pretty small, but it came out good enough to start sewing the big quilt, which means sewing lots of the small triangles:

I don’t know how many of those were in there when I took the picture, but by now I’ve finished the 192 in this colour combination and did quite a few in the other combinations as well. It’s pretty mindless work, but there are a lot of those to sew. I’ll leave you with this, need to get back to the sewing machine if I want to have any chance to finish that quilt sometime before the deadline.

I like to design my quilts myself. I don’t own any fancy software for this, and I actually prefer scribbling with a pencil on a piece of paper. Works well if you are drawing something that uses a square grid, as you can use normal squared paper. But my latest idea was something based on the Koch Snowflake, and it’s all equilateral triangles there. So, after unsuccessfully trying to draw my design up on normal paper and almost giving up on that idea, I decided to go look around the web if I could come up with something more suitable. I ended up at an amazing site for generating your very own graph paper. At this site there are a lot of different types of graph papers, some seemingly designed with the quilter in mind, like the tumbling block paper. You can customize the distance between lines for most papers. As another imporant feature for quilters, distances can be specified both in inches and in centimeters, depending on what you prefer.

So, I made up my equilateral triangle graph paper in a few different sizes, and started to play. Here’s the basic design:

Drawing it suddenly got much easier. The smallest triangles (not even shown on the basic design sketch) will only have a side length of 1 cm. So paper-piecing is the only option for that, if I want any degree of accuracy. The paper-piecing template is drawn on equilateral triangle graph-paper, too, this time with a side length of 1 cm.

Couldn’t be easier. So, I highly recommend playing with this site if you need any specialized graph paper to make the design in your head become reality. I’ve seriously started sewing on this quilt this weekend, and things seem to go really well, at least for now. Ask me again about 400 of those paper-pieced triangles later, but I hope the result will make up for all the drudgery.