Making Peace with Paper-Piecing

It's Saturday, my friends. It's looking a little foggy out my window today, but I believe it might be nice enough for a walk outside. I'll wait for a bit before deciding. If not, there's always the Chamber of Horrors in the basement. I can do my walking on the treadmill if I need to. 

There isn't much to report from yesterday. I spent most of my sewing day working on crazy quilt blocks for the left and right sides of Pieces of the Past. I'll give it credit for being the size it's supposed to be. I needed to sew on a border, and it went on easier than any borders I've sewn in recent memory.

The white background for the embroidery is a white fairy frost, and it doesn't photograph well. It is pretty in person, though. I have fairy frost fabrics in several colors, and I love the shimmer they bring. For this quilt, the white reminded me of porcelain, and it seemed a good idea for those embroidered plates.

When I turned my attention to the paper-piecing, Smitty was there to provide the zen for the room.

He grew alarmed when he saw that we were doing paper-piecing.

He thought it best to stay close, just in case I got any ideas about turning the rotary cutter against my own throat. He helped me with the folding and trimming.

Here's the thing I hate about paper-piecing. It seems like a "gotcha" technique. No matter how careful I am, I still manage to cut some pieces a little too short, and then I end up with a hole.

I've said this before, but I'll say it again: I hate paper-piecing. I know how to do it. I've taken classes. I have the tools. Knowing how to do a thing and wanting to do it are two different things. I know how to get the hard water stains off my toilet bowl too, but it's near the bottom of the list of things I want to do. Paper-piecing is probably even lower on the list. 

So, getting back to the problem above, it was easy enough to fix by taking the seam on the last piece a little deeper.

Then, I just trimmed it to the right size, and no harm done. One done, but we weren't getting off to a very friendly start. 

Smitty couldn't decide where his assistance was required most. He could hold down the finished pieces.

Or he could keep the scraps in order. His long tail is a very handy tool for this.

When I had four done (25% of the total), I had some lunch and took a break.

When I returned, there was about an hour left in my sewing day. I was able to finish three more.

So that was a pretty good day's work. Seven of the 16 are finished. I doubt I'll get the rest finished today, but tomorrow is looking good. If I were following the instructions from the pattern, I would be doing fancy stitching over each of the seam lines, and I'd be adding some more embroidery to these. I'm not doing any of that. From here on, my goal is to finish the blocks and sew them together. When that is done, I'll call it a finished quilt top, even though I'm skipping a lot of what I could do.

While I've been cursing paper-piecing, Mike has been cursing painting. Painting is one of his most hated tasks. I've been after him to paint our bathroom for at least a couple of years. This winter, he decided to get it done. And, yes, I could have done the painting, but you must understand something about engineers: they are perfectionists. Indeed, they have to be. A whole lot of money goes into developing a new product, and an engineer never wants to be the one who created a design flaw that causes all the investment to go to waste. So, all of that to say that I could never paint to his standards. He would prefer not painting at all, but if it must be done, he'll be the one to do it. (BTW, that's just fine with me.)

So the bathroom was this ugly dark mauve color when we moved into the house 20+ years ago. The countertops and grout for the tile floor are a similar color. And so our choices for towels and rugs are limited. Nevertheless, we chose a pale gray to cover over the mauve.

If nothing else, the room will be lighter and brighter. When the master bath is finished, he's going to paint the bathroom on the main level. That one is a dark gray, and its new color will be a pale blue. Besides, now that the basement is finished, we need at least one room in the house to be in absolute chaos, or we don't feel quite right about our lives.

So I'll get back to my sewing today. I probably have a few more days to finish my latest stitchery, and then I'll be starting a new "short" piece...this one called "Sewing Day":

You can find the pattern from Blueberry Backroads right here. I'm already pulling fabrics and thinking about tracing it out. It's a nice distraction from paper-piecing.

As always, there's plenty on the day's agenda. I'm trying out a new recipe for dinner tonight. It's one for the Dutch oven, which means I'll need to get started early. Already, I'm starting with a truncated sewing day, and maybe that's just as well. Just now I looked outside to see little icy stuff falling from the sky. I guess it's the treadmill for my exercising pleasure today.