Hopfaldera: November 2011

I'm still plowing along at my Farmer's Wife Sampler quilt blocks. I have made 53 blocks so far. There are 111 in total, so I only need three more to pass the half way point, pretty good! It's still fun to pick and choose fabric combinations for these blocks. And making the blocks: some are hard, some are easy, some are fun, some are boring. It's great to have that goal of 111 to work towards, and I'm learning a lot.

Here is #48, Homeward Bound. For the most part made with fabric from a tunic that Damaris put on the recycle pile because it was too small.

And these three are partly made with fabric I got as a gift from my friend Monique.

And here is the whole pile of 53 blocks. See them up close on Flickr.

The October theme in the Cocorico Bee was Orchard! Annabel asked for blocks that were inspired by orchards, and that were 12.5" by 16.5" in size. In this post I'll try to show how I went from my inspiration to the finished block. I didn't take photos during the hardest bits, because I was sweating and sewing, and not thinking about blogging. But I hope the process will be a bit demystified :-)

This picture was my inspiration. It comes from a little booklet I still have from when I was a child. It has German rhymes in it, and cute drawings.

I asked Frederik to make an enlargement of the book illustration at his office. I used that to make a first draft of the pattern. What I did was put see through pattern paper on top of the photo copy and try to recreate the drawing with a ruler. My thinking was that if I can draw a straight line with a ruler, I can also sew a straight line there.

Soon I had to simplify the apple core with the pips, because sewing five was just too intricate.

I felt the magic number to show variety was three, so three pips I drew!

And this is the final pattern that I made. You can see I played around with different stalks.

Now comes the part where I don't have a lot of photos. I did show a sneak peek on Flickr here. But otherwise I was either procrastinating, drawing partial patterns, sick, or sewing...

Here is a photo of the back of the block just after I finished the piecing. You can see that I split the pattern into five sections that I pieced separately. This was necessary for inward pointing curves, very hard to explain, but you'll understand as soon as you try something like this...

Detail of the pattern sections. I made little notes about which fabric to use. Very helpful during the process, where you get caught in the details and loose the bird's eye view for a while.

And here you can see the enlarged illustration and the finished piecing. I was so proud when I got to this point. Proud enough to think about my camera again.