On Tuesday I took a Paperless Piecing class with Cristy Fincher that was hosted by my quilt guild, SCVQA in San Jose. Cristy Fincher of Purple Daisies Quilting is the daughter of award-winning quilter, Sharon Schamber. The two of them developed this fantastic alternative to foundation paper piecing. No more dealing with little bits of paper that you have to tweeze out of the seams. And lots of super pointy points. It all comes down to glue-basting and old fashioned pressing.
We spent all day learning the technique while working on a 12" block from Cristy's very modern quilt pattern, Folded. Of course I grabbed some of my favorite colors from the stash to make my block. It still needs to be starched, pressed and trimmed but it's nice to see the super point of that long triangle piece.
Cristy showed us a new-to-me app called PicFrame. Using my iPhone I took a square picture of the quilt block cropped to take off the seam allowance. Then it's collaged into a four-patch so that we can see what the final quilt will look like.
(My phone takes better pictures than the camera does at night.)
Of course the beauty of PicFrame is that you can rotate the block and play around with the number of squares. Here's what it'd look like if I changed the direction of those points. And then here's the quilt with 16 blocks. Not sure that I'd do that but it's nice to find a quick and easy app to help decide how to place a quilt.
I had to finish a client's baby quilt Tuesday night and yesterday, but today I spent some time cutting out the pieces for the next three blocks. Maybe tomorrow I'll be able to sew them and get the top done. I'll probably add a border to it. Cristy developed a beautiful one that looks like it'll be fun to sew.
A few of us took Cristy out to dinner on Monday night. We had interesting conversations and got to know her a little better. She's very sweet and is in her element as a teacher. If there's more than one way to do something she'll show them to you and let you decide what you want to do. And we all got done, or were pretty darn close to finishing that one block and learning the technique. That's a skill that not every teacher has. Now I'm wondering how I can transform more quilt patterns into these paperless piecing blocks. Thank you for a wonderful class Cristy!