I had to look at this one closely to understand what I was seeing. My eyes just did not want to read two tiny little mice sitting down to a delicious cheese dinner. lol Tini from the Netherlands sent me this one. I really like the batik she has chosen; I bet no two of her siggies look alike.
This sashing was really easy to make by paper piecing because I just measured it out on graph paper and luckily all the seams fell on grid lines. You can see I labeled the paper "P" for pink and "G" for green. It's surprisingly easy to get messed up, even on a simple thing like this!
I may have gone over the legal limit for pins per inch here. It took 12 pins for less than 5 linear inches of seam - and I had to do it four times over.
It ended up being much more accurate than it would otherwise have been without the pins though.
Now I just have to figure out what to do next. Do I bead or do I make my tiny little quilt sandwich and quilt it, then bead it? Any hints? I'm afraid if I bead it first (and I plan on LOTS of beads) then I won't be able to quilt it without running into the beads, even with my 1/4" foot. It's a worry; I guess I'll sleep on it. 8-)
I'm going to add green 1/4" sashes and tiny little pink cornerstones. I strip paper-pieced the first seam to get these blocks really accurate, then cut them to the right length and sewed the blocks together. I plan to add the green horizontal sashes so I'll have two vertical strips of little blocks. I'm going to use large green chunks of fabric for the horizontal sashes, then cut them to fit. No sewing with 1/4" strips of fabric for me! I then plan to strip paper-piece the vertical sashes and cornerstones together first so they'll be super accurate. I don't want to work with tiny little pieces here either, so I'm not going to cut the paper-pieced strips apart until they are sewn onto the blocks. It sounds harder than I think it's actually going to be... I hope!
My second Christmas ornament is going to be a simple 3" square pink & green friendship star made with Thangles. I've made lots of friendship stars this size before, so they're not a big deal for me, not like the little quilt. I may even make two and reverse the colors.
Finally, I plan to embellish them with the pink & green beads I bought 9 months ago, when I first thought of making these ornaments.
The first set of blocks I did were the yellow/orange/red Ohio Stars. I had never paper pieced before, so this was very much a learning experience. You could really tell from the backside which blocks were my earliest paper piecing attempts, lol I was very glad to get the quilt sandwich made up so all that could be hidden away permanently!
I stippled, of course, this is me after all, with red on top and blue on the back. The backing material is the same blue fabric as the blue in the red pointed star. I didn't have enough of the orange in the first set of Ohio Stars to make the last block, and wouldn't you know this was fabric I bought in Canmore, Alberta! Fortunately, my friend, Neelu, and her family went to Calgary for a lovely Indian wedding and then on to Banff for a vacation. For a very small bribe Neelu happily went to the quilt store in Canmore and found a VERY similar fabric. If you look very closely (don't) the orange fabric on the star in the upper left corner is very slightly different from the ones all in a row. Thanks again Neelu, and also to your two boys who were sooo not thrilled about going to a fabric store on vacation.
Let's see if I can remember who did which block: From the left:
