Hello! Welcome to my blog if you’re new here. I’ve loved participating in Project Quilting so far and it’s been quite invigorating for my quilting. I am from Albany in the beautiful Willamette Valley in Oregon.

This is a long post and picture heavy as I detail my process for this week’s challenge for Project Quilting. The Project Quilting challenge was posted on January 21st and the theme this time is Triangles. I was initially stumped on what to do but I worked through some drawings and finally settled on an English Paper Pieced design inspired by the picture below. I believe this is a piece of architecture but have no idea what building it is or where it is. Do you know? I love how the triangles are three dimensional and I set out to see if I could do that with my English Paper Pieced templates.

I found free templates via Pinterest for this particular Isosceles Triangle shape and I chose to use some of my rose gold fabric for that lovely sheen. I really love rose gold.

I prefer to thread baste my fabric to my templates as opposed to gluing. Gluing works well and is quicker but I like the rhythm of the hand sewing.

My first attempt at sewing the three triangles together to make one unit didn’t work out. I sewed from the back of the shapes as you would with traditional English Paper Piecing and the triangles laid flat. I didn’t want flat triangles, I wanted them to stand up a bit for that three dimensional look.

I decided to sew the pieces together from the front and that helped to get them to stand up a bit. I found the technique of sewing from the front in vintage Moravian Star pincushions. These were sewn from the front and stuffed with stuffing to make a three dimensional pincushion.

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In the above pictures you can see that I have basted and sewn together the triangles to make one triangle unit and then the front and back of my finished triangle.

I decided on making a large triangle out of my small triangle units. I made nine triangle units for my design. I cut the basting threads and pulled out the paper templates. The triangle units fell a little flat at this point but my husband suggested that I use fiber fil under each unit as I sewed it down to keep everything standing up a bit. Although not a traditional solution I thought about the technique of trapunto and how it’s used to puff up sections of quilting. I decided to go for it.

I laid out my large triangle design on a black background and pinned it down. I sandwiched the top, batting and backing and decided to quilt it with black thread using the walking foot before stuffing the triangle.

I stuffed the triangles, tucked the tails under, and then appliqued the edges down. I was really nervous about the quilting and applique step but it worked out ok. I bound the mini quilt in black.

The triangles are puffy instead of angular which I should have realized was going to happen with fiber fil and my fabric puckered along the edges while I was appliqueing it down. Taking on the Project Quilting challenges is definitely a way to stretch myself and move away from following a pattern. I love all the patterns out there but sometimes I feel the need to create outside the box and don’t know how to do it. I’m trying new things and there are bound to be successes and failures along the way.

Now to get back to some of my other quilting projects between challenges. I have two passage quilts to finish and some pillows to quilt.

Happy Quilting!

Camille