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Back in March I attended
A Mountain Quiltfest. One of the classes I took was
Cindy Blackberg’s hand piecing class.
[Apologies for the quality of the pictures to follow. Shooting one handed with an iphone is awkward.]
What’s different about Cindy’s hand-piecing technique is that she uses template stamps.
Using a stamp and fabric ink, you stamp your pieces out. Both the cut and the stitch lines are marked. A relatively new technique Cindy teaches is “continuous piecing.” Lay your pieces out. It is possible to sew all 5 pieces of the first row continuously, without having to cut the thread, if you stitch following the arrows.
Pick up your first 2 pieces. Put a small pin in the far corner, making sure it pierces the far corner of the bottom piece.
Start sewing from the near corner, taking a backstitch and sewing across to the pin. Take a backstitch. Unlike machine sewing, we do not sew in the seam allowance.
Pick up your next piece, pin the corner. Pass the needle thru from the corner of the yellow square to the corner of the blue triangle. Take a backstitch and sew to the next corner.
You’ll keep adding pieces, sewing in the direction of the arrows, until the row is complete.
Now we’re going to sew our completed row onto the rest of the block. Once again we place a pin in the far left corner. We take a backstitch in the rightmost corner. And we proceed to sew. When we come to the next corner, we push all the seam allowances, top and bottom to our left.
Take a backstitch. And pass our needle, not sewing in the seam allowance, to the bottom corner of the next piece.
Push all the seam allowances to the right, take a backstitch and continue to sew. Repeat until the entire seam is complete. Your block is now complete. You can now press and trim dog ears.
I haven’t been able to find a video of Cindy Blackberg demonstrating this technique. But I did find this video of Jinny Beyer hand piecing a tumbling block using a slightly different approach. From about 4:30 you’ll see the manipulation of the seam allowances, which is the tricky part.
The class was surprisingly relaxing, as hand piecing is much more forgiving than machine piecing. I hope this inspires you to try hand piecing, as we always need a project for our "busy bag."
And as always, what are you working on?
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After doing quite well with scheduling for awhile, there are now lots of open dates. Would you like to write a future DK Quilt Guild diary? Please join in! Please volunteer within the comments. Thanks
The schedule:
7/07 -- OPEN
7/14 -- OPEN
7/21 -- OPEN
7/28 -- madmommy