I made a foundation paper-pieced quilt recently and was reminded of how much I really dislike paper piecing. 🙂

Luckily that doesn’t stop me designing sketches that’d use it!

For some reason, chain piecing and repetitive tasks don’t bother me with normal sewing, but the folding and flipping and placing and sewing and trimming and folding of paper piecing…. arrrghhhhhhh. It’s interminable. It probably didn’t help that the quilt I recently made used 4 sets of 12 templates (I’ll share that one in the next few months).

But sometimes, a design has the kind of shapes or seam lines that would require paper piecing to make accurately. And this is one of them. I’m not saying I’d make this one, but perhaps it’ll inspire you?

This is one of those design’s that’s been in my head for years but I never quite managed to get out. I tried a similar approach in Sunday sketch #460 – those rays extending out and connecting across blocks – but I wanted something a little more restrained. I find it a bit hard to design atypical shapes/lines in Electric Quilt 8 (and this is not a design for Excel!), but here I’ve come as close as I can to ensuring all eight ‘arms’ are about the same size/thickness. If I were making this one into a quilt, I’d make sure the templates themselves had perfect radial symmetry.

Anyway, on to some different versions.

I thought the colours made this one feel a little firework-y; it’s got a bit of a party atmosphere. But ultimately I love the impact of a two-colour quilt, especially when it features such simple shapes.

Paring back to one shape introduces some really interesting secondary shapes and movement…

In the first version, I put the circles on the inside, but they work on the outside too…

And then it’s possible to change up the foreground/background to play with the negative space…

   

I haven’t thought through how to design the templates to make each asterisk… you’d need more than one per asterisk. I’d probably try to avoid splitting any of the arms between templates, which might mean you’d need to sew some slightly skewed seams. People who are more adept at paper piecing than me can figure that one out 🙂