The Salt Creek Quilters Guild - Quilt Show

Last weekend I had the opportunity to attend my first ever quilt show! A friend from my guild had posted about this show in a nearby town, on a whim I decided to go. The show was pretty cool, although a whole lot more traditional than I'm used to! I can respect the talent though! 

One thing that I was surprised by was that their Mini-quilt section could have just been re-named "art quilts" since only one or two of them were pieced. I was a bit disappointed by this since that's the most inspiring area for me. 

Paper pieced mini quilt by Kathy Elwood

They did have vendors - and yes I bought a couple FQ's... how could I not? And they had some demos. One of which really inspired me. It was a demo on "no-tear paper piecing" by Kathy Elwood. Now I've seen tutorials for this method before, and it was really nothing very new to me... but I walked up to the table there and she was working with 2 1/2" squares -- that gets me! All her samples were miniature quilts (the real thing, to scale!) Tiny tiny piecing!! So of course I stuck around to watch her demo and ask some questions. the most mind blowing thing? she uses a large basting stitch to secure the paper to the fabric!

Kathy demonstrating this method... note the amazing tiny quilts all around her!

I do notice that this method of paper piecing isn't nearly as "perfect" as the other way, but heck, it gets me out of picking out those tiny pieces of paper afterward! The blocks she was doing were built out from the center, but I wanted to try it with my fling geese arcs -- since I see quite a few of them in my near future, and this would save me from having to trace my patterns a million times! 

Hand drawn flying geese pattern (transferred to template plastic!) and rows of geese!

Here's a link to a similar method... although she presses hers to the freezer paper so they stick there (I didn't want to go to my ironing board every time when finger pressing is all that's necessary... and I think the basting stitches hold better. 

Here's how it worked. I used a large basting stitch (a 3 on my Juki) to secure the first geese triangle to the paper then used the no-tear method to sew the two outer triangles on. After adding the next flying geese unit, I finger pressed it and then basted that one down. I basted each center geese piece so that the curves didn't shift. they turned out pretty great and I was able to re-use the paper 3 times (simply pull the top string of each of your basting stitches to remove). I'm pretty sure I can get another couple times out of my paper since I traced it out onto freezer paper (it lasts a bit longer than regular paper). 

Close-up of the basting stitches

I want to give a shout out to Kathy -- Thanks for sharing this tip!!! Sewing these flying geese curves is so much easier now that I don't have to re-trace the pattern every time!

PS - I also pre-cut my pieces for this project instead of doing them one by one like I do many paper piecing patterns, this shortened the sewing time by a lot!! 

From the back.