Friday, May 29, 2009

::: Spinning a Web :::

Sneak peek! This is the beginnings of my mother's (belated) Mother's Day gift. I sort of took on too much at one time. I was in the process of piecing a "Five & Dime" quilt for myself and took a third of the quilt top to my folks' house to show mom. She really liked the fabric and so, unbeknownst to her, I saved all my scraps and am using them to create a [table topper] for her, too. Yes, I know...another table topper. Small and simple, yet: "Never despise meager beginnings!"

And so begins the spiderweb...

I really, really love this fabric! It has "shiny" in it... And I'm digging brown at the moment. And who could argue with paisley???? The backing for my quilt is the dark brown, and eventually I'll do a scrappy binding. But, I digress. Each of the spiderweb blocks for mom's [table topper] will be a series of 4 of the striped triangles. There's a post at Quiltville that shows you how to do paper-pieced spiderwebs, but that scared me. I created my own "kite" template with the help of Quilt It and am piecing directly onto my background fabric. I suppose it's a bit wasteful considering two of the triangle points get cut off------but it's quick and easy and less intimidating than running my needle through paper. *Grin*


Again, with the blank on fabric designers. I'm sure there are some good ones in here, but I'm not a designer junkie --- I'm a fabric lover! I wish you could see the detail better on the light green and cream fabrics. That's GOLD all over...and it's shiny and beautiful!

My foundation fabric + kite. I am pleased with my kite... My finished block size will be 12" --- I made up kites for several other sizes, too. That's what I liked about Quilt It ; I can make spiderwebs in ANY size, not just the size of the available template.

Hopefully I'll have a finished [table topper] to show you soon!

P.S. These are two other spiderwebs that pushed me over the edge --- after seeing these, I knew I had to try my hand at it. Ah, the blissful ignorance of a newbie: Nothing scares me! (Well, nothing that is except paper-piecing...)

3 comments:

  1. Do you hand quilt or use a machine?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Currently, machine. But the freedom of hand quilting is calling. I want to give it a try on a quilt I'm making for myself. I hope to have the top pieced and sandwiched before our camping trip in August. Then I'll be able to take it along with me! I shall let you know... I understand your grandma was a beautiful quilter -- maybe I can ask your mom if she has some quilts I can look at for inspiration?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Probably, Kristin actually finds that it is easier to hand quilt than to use a machine since the machine tends to bunch the quilting. There is some trick to it that has to do with taping the quilt to the table before pinning it together. Otherwise its always fun to get more than one person on a quilt stretcher to hand stich everything.

    ReplyDelete