Thursday, August 20, 2009

Painting and Paper piecing

I enjoy sewing the mystery blocks at Paper Panache and have made many of them over the years. These blocks combine two of my favorite activities - mystery quilting and paper piecing.  I have sewn the block that Linda currently has for sale on the Paper Panache home page which was a previous mystery block #38.
I have this guy up on my design wall and often think about sewing some cat blocks in the border, but just haven't gotten around to it.
(Hey... Linda has a free pattern to sew "a round tuit"  click here!!)
Anyway, it's too hot here to do much machine quilting these days, so I have been slowly working on the new mystery block #52. I had set a challenge for myself to use only fabrics I had hand painted.  (You can read about it here and see the colours I painted).
 I started piecing the blocks and quickly ran out of the light blue fabric  before I had sewn half of the pieces. 
So I got out the paints again and painted more blue. The problem is I never write anything down, so I had to figure out which blue it was, and how much water to add to get a matching colour, and then see if it was usable once it dried (paint always dries lighter). This was trickey and very unscientific, as is my usual style!
But I think I got enough blue yardage that is "close enough". 
Here you can see the parts I had finished piecing on the right, my instruction sheet with the colour chart, the scraps of the original leftover blue pieces, and the remaining pattern pieces to sew, all on top of the new blue fabric...what do you think....is it a close enough match?!?

4 comments:

Karen said...

That's the best mouse I have seen for a quilt block.

Greenmare said...

love the little mouse!! I think your blues are fabulous!

Ginger Patches said...

either my computer is misbehaving (quite likely) or your pictures don't enlarge and I can't see it very well. From what i can see it looks great!

Sweet P said...

That mouse is super adorable!