Circles, Triangles, Paper Piecing...

I've been wanting to try a few things so I just took some time to play in the last few weeks. 

First, I wanted to try some paper piecing with freezer paper. I took the Freezer Paper Piecing Masterclass with Rebecca Bryan. I had this Rainbow Radial Quilt pattern from Audrey Esarey that I wanted to try and thought it would be a good place to try my new paper piecing skills. 

So I rounded up some scraps and found everything to be quite easy. The one little glitch was that the four outside corner pattern pieces were a tad too big. It could easily have been a user error, The next time I'll 'dry-fit' the pieces before any sewing begins.

After taking pictures, I saw that 2 of the blue fabrics had run a little. That is being fixed.

My completed piece is 36" square. I quilted this with a walking foot and straight lines that are 1-1/4" apart. I wanted to do a grid but decided one way was enough. When I had to make corrections for the corner pieces being off, my piece wasn't sure it wanted to be flat. It's fine but I didn't want to fight it anymore with more quilting. I used 50-weight Aurifil #2600 Dove grey thread for the quilting. Instead of binding, this has a facing. The table topper is rather plain but looks fine on our dining table. 

The back is a pale orange with a white dot.

Now that I have a pretty good understanding about this circle quilt, I think I can draft whatever I want. There may be some interesting circles in the future.

When I took Rebecca Bryan's class, I signed up for everything on her website for a year. She has these amazing BOMs on her site. She does a lot of design work with triangles and I wanted to pursue that. So instead of a whole quilt in one of her beautiful BOM designs, I opted for The Big Mini. It is the center of the Stargazer quilt. You can see from my smudged notes that the design is made of triangles. 

With no idea what I was doing, I chose some orange, yellow, and blue scraps and began. I did not do her preliminary steps concerning color. I just wanted to test some things. Here is my Big Mini in a black and white photo. 

And here it is in color. It's about 28" wide and already in the scrap box. I don't like how it turned out but I learned things and that's what I was really after. My major dislike is the many multiple seam joins. It gets to be very bulky.

I've decided I don't want to make one of Rebecca's BOMs but I do enjoy her modern triangles. So I will probably have some kind of  Modern Triangle Quilt in the future. Many of the triangles are paper pieced and I think they all could be.

I also just started Bonnie Hunter's Jamestown Landing Quilt. I've always loved that quilt and saw it again the other day. I decided that now is the time to make it even though I have a number of other projects in progress.

The health update: I saw the specialist for my bones. I'll be taking shots to increase my bone density. I'm waiting to hear which shots (there are 3 possibilities). More patience. We did get our 2nd Covid vaccines and all went well.