Experimenting with Set-In Piecing Simplified

Have you discovered Jodi of Tales Of Cloth in Australia on Instagram?

She and her husband cut and sell precut pieces for English paper piecing and she is very creative!

Her Instagram name is @talesofcloth and you can browse their website HERE.

For the past year, she's offered a monthly program for a block she named Ice Cream Soda.  It's perfect for fussy cutting and dozens of stitchers have been posting their blocks -- check it out for yourself and search the hashtag #icecreamsodaquilt -- there are 3277 posts!?!

So I thought I'd give machine piecing it a whirl!

Inspired by everyone's fussy cutting I cut into this hoarded piece of Charley Harper's sandpiper fabric -- perfect.  I have a sacred stash of "landscape" fabrics that offered several possibilities.

The pieces were easy to cut using Marti Michell's Set G and 2" Kite and Crown set.

The first step is to fiddle around with the pieces to determine the best piecing order.

This step is such a valuable skill -- learned it from Mary Ellen Hopkins years ago!!

I often begin with a unit of three pieces -- it's usually a good starting point!

As I've said before, I get more accurate centers when machine piecing for 6-pointed stars by working in thirds.

If you are new to my blog, I chain piece through y-seams -- that's what Set-In Piecing Simplified is all about!!  Click on the picture of my face up there on the right to read about the teaching guide I see on Etsy!

So far so good!!

Then things began to unravel a bit -- because the y-seam intersection has four seams coming into it, it was more challenging.  That made stopping in the right place more challenging and took some of the fun out it for me.  It was days before I got the block completely assembled.

It looks good here, but the effort to assemble it was frustrating and I still need to add some little diamonds to finish off this experiment.

I came and went from it so many times, that I mixed up two of the bird pieces and lost the symmetry of their direction (go back up and look at the beginning layout).

Do I go back and fix it??

Conclusion -- this block will be easier and more enjoyable to paper piece!!

So after the first of the year, I'll be ordering the papers so I can be part of the fun on Instagram, too!!

There's another experiment on the cutting wall!

The inspiration is from an excellent EPP tutorial by blogger Aylin that she wrote for the Finish-A-Long 2013.  She called the pattern Ferris Wheel.

You can read it HERE.

The cutting is plodding along and with Christmas gift deadlines, I won't have time to experiment with the stitching until the New Year.  It could be another fail but we'll see??

If you follow me on Instagram, I just reached 600 followers over there and have a GIVEAWAY posted -- closes Friday morning, 12/1 at 8 a.m. EST.

Keep stitching!!

Mary