Design Wall Monday: Prepping for Piecing Group

Boy, are my Piecing Group friends going to be surprised. For the first time in five or six go-rounds, I'm not handing out my WIVSP triangle project. It's now in too few pieces to hand out; I'm in the process of sewing the rows together. So what am I going to hand out?

Well, curves are great for hand piecing, so I've chosen a Winding Ways project. Here are the parts on my design wall in preparation for making up the kits. This will end up as a 40" x 40" baby quilt.

Each person will get a kit to make one block. Here's one of my sample & test blocks:

In hand piecing, all of the pieces have the seams marked on the wrong side for stitching. 25 blocks times 12 pieces per block, that's 300 pieces all carefully marked. I cut them with my die cutter, then came back and marked the quarter-inch seam lines.

In hand piecing, we float our seams which means we never stitch across seam allowances, we let them hang free so they can be pressed in the best direction later. Since I didn't stitch across the seam allowances at the center, the curved edges came together nicely and I can spin the seam allowances to reduce the bulk.

Since these pieces are die cut, I made two machine sewn test blocks as well, just to try out the cut parts. They didn't come out as nice at the center as the hand pieced blocks.

We have 16 members. I need 21 more blocks in addition to the four test blocks I made, so I'll package up the kits and hand them out. Maybe I can get the leftover kits pieced myself this month, so that when everyone returns their blocks to me next month, I can assemble the top.

Last time I talked about Piecing Group, someone asked how it works. This post explains it well.

Meanwhile, I'm off to stuff baggies with instructions and pieces so I'll be ready to hand out tomorrow. Thank goodness I don't have to host until next month! It takes a lot of time to prep kits for Piecing Group.


Link ups:
Small Quilts and Doll Quilts
Em's Scrapbag
Love Laugh Quilt