Design Wall Monday & WIP Wednesday: the Piecing Group triangle project

Updated 11/6: Linking up with WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced. Check out all the inspiration over there!

I belong to a group that does hand piecing. I've been a member since 2000, and I really enjoy the meetings, the projects, the friendships, the camaraderie, and the desserts.

For hand piecing, we mark the seam lines on the wrong side of the fabric so we can stitch on the lines, and we stop at the seam allowances, which allows the seams to be pressed in any direction, even after an intersecting seam has been sewn. For this reason, hand piecing is great for projects involving Y-seams.

For those readers who are fond of English Paper Piecing, this is not the same. We don't use paper, and we just hand-sew our seams with straight running stitches.

In 2007 I started a project using tiny kite-shaped pieces to make triangles. I made templates for marking and for cutting.  The short seams measure 1" long and the triangle sides will finish at 4".

Here you can see the cutting template, the marking template, one marked patch, 3 patches laid out in a triangle, and one completed triangle.

My turn to hand out at Piecing Group comes around roughly every 18 months. We've already done four go-rounds on this project. The first three were for making the triangles, and the fourth was for sewing some of the triangles into rows.

This project has been on my design wall for more total time and more times than any other. My design wall is HUGE - almost floor to ceiling and 7 feet wide. That's almost the size of a queen size quilt. This quilt will end up about queen size; I don't know yet what the finished dimensions will be.  Because there are so many seams in this project, only half of the pieces could fit on the wall left to right at one time.

Last go round, we pieced the rows from the left side to the center. This time we'll continue each row from the center out to the right side.

What you can't see here is that the colors are very pale in the center of the quilt and get darker, very dark, toward the outside edges. There will be black border all around.

I'm very grateful for the help from my Piecing Group friends on this project. Without them, it wouldn't be possible.

The name of this quilt will be "How Many?"   - As in, how many fabrics? (over 200 different batiks used) How many of those tiny kite-shaped pieces? Not a clue, I'll count when it's finished. How many triangles? How many hexies? How many helpers worked on it? How many years did it take?

Someday I'll be able to show you the finished quilt. But you'll have to wait for at least one, maybe two more go-rounds of Piecing Group first!

Linking up with Judy over at Patchwork Times; check out what everyone else has on their design wall today.