Saturday, January 24, 2009

Happy Hour & Paper Plate Quilting

I finished piecing together all of the Happy Hour quilt today.  Talk about an easy quilt.  I think it will be a perfect quilt to start my mom off with.  Here are a few pictures of it up on my design wall.  I'm still moving some of the blocks around until I get an arrangement that I'm satisfied with.  I think I'm getting there.  It's probably going to be one of those quilts where I am going to need to tell myself to just stop and stop moving things around.  
   

Also, I promised I'd show how I use paper plates to help me organize my quilting.  It's a technique that I learned during my first quilting class several years ago.  

The general idea is to use the plates to organize your fabric.  Depending on the quilt, I'll either use one plate for one block, as in this example for the Happy Hour quilt or for one particular piece that's reoccurring in many blocks.  

You'll see that I have one block on each paper plate stacked in this first picture. It helps me to keep the order of the blocks in the same order the whole time while I'm chain piecing.  The stack of plates up front are the blocks yet to be sewn and the blocks in the back have already been sewn.  

The second picture shows how I stack the plates with the different blocks.  It doesn't wrinkle the fabric, which is a major plus. In stacking the plates it really does a good job of keeping everything together.

 
In this third picture you'll see a number on the plate left over from a previous project that I also used these plates for.  I was creating a quilt in which I needed to sort out the different shapes.  This is extremely helpful when you have, for example, 2 inch and 2 1/4 inch squares cut out of the same fabric.  By putting all of the 2 inch squares on one plate and labeling them and putting the 2 1/4 squares on another, you're able to easily tell them apart without having to measure all the time.  Again, you can stack them to save space, which is helpful during classes, retreats, or just in a small quilting space.  

I hope this tip helps some of you out there. Happy Quilting!
  

5 comments:

  1. Your Happy Hour quilt turned out great! I love the fabrics that you used. Especially the geometric prints. They are great. Thanks for sharing your paper plate organization tip!

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  2. It turned out great! I'm also working on the same quilt in pinks/browns. I'm teaching a class on it in Feb. It's such a simple pattern, but good for beginning quilters, so I hope they like it.

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  3. What a fantastic idea with the paper plates, I am making a log cabin at the moment and am always getting muddled between blocks when I lay a few out at a time to chain piece. I am definitly giving it a go! I Love your Happy Hour :)

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  4. Love the happy hour!! I really love the color scheme. Makes me want to redo my color scheme on my happy hour. I LOVE the quilting board that you used to lay out your quilt. Thanks also for the neat paper plate tip.

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  5. Complimenti, hai lavori belli!

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