I have done a few little dog related bits of sewing/designing lately in preparation for a dog quilt I want to make for next months Pets on Quilts. Today I finally had some time to focus on that project for a few hours:
I finally made the patchwork backgrounds for my applique shadow dogs:
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| Shadow Henry and Ebony |
Then I decided to make a brown dachsund because my husband had 3 brown dachsunds growing up and we love the breed, he is pretty small but very cute:
I also put a border around the embroidered Ebony that I made a couple of weeks ago:
Then I started to add the sashing to get an idea of how my colours will look:
At this point I decided to finally attempt one of the remaining two blocks I had decided would be a part of this quilt. I had been putting it off because they are paper piecing patterns and I have never done paper piecing!!! But I recently saw this tutorial:
http://www.favecraftsblog.com/foundation-paper-pieceing-tutorial/comment-page-2/#comment-131467
The simplicity of the example block made it look pretty easy and finally I understood the gobbledegook I had read in my Cats and Dogs Paper piecing pattern book! This is the book I got my pattern from and an example of a pattern as seen in the book:
I chose the Golden Retriever pattern because it has long legs like my Henry and I just did it black to better represent Henry. It took me about 10 mins of fiddling around and unpicking even after rereading the tutorial to wrap my head around the backwards nature of this type of piecing, then I was off and running with my first PP piece:
Block 1
is tiny and probably wasn't a good first FPP idea!
Once I knew I was doing it right I was a bit excited about learning a new process for piecing so I enjoyed the task especially once it started looking like an actual dog!
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| The back before removing the paper |
The tail didn't line up perfectly but I am still very happy with it. But then my real trouble started I couldn't get the paper off, I tried and tried and eventually just soaked the block in the kitchen sink and rubbed the paper away once it had softened:
Then I had a little trouble making an ear small enough for the dog! The pattern in the book was so small I couldn't turn it right side out once it was sewn! Eventually I managed to make a rather large ear, but my Cockapoo has lovely big ears so that is fine! I added the border at the same time because the ear is sewn into the seam:
Then I laid out all my dog quilt block ideas to see how it was looking:
3 applique dogs
1 embroidered dog
1 Off the Leash cartoon cut from my PJs
1 gorgeous photo of Henry and Ebony playing with my batik scraps (printed onto fabric)
1 PP dog
I clearly need to do another PP dog to go in the top right hand corner, but once that is done I can start to embelish the blocks with borders and sashing to complete the quilt top.