Project - a small quilt.

 

 

Last summer a friend gave me a whole box of old quilting magazines she had gathered from her mother's home.  I was thrilled to recieve these magazines.  I would take a handful from the box and place them at my bedside where I could read thru them at bedtime and during the night when I awoke.  I love to read thru old quilting magazines, the patterns are so lovley and they are so inspiring.  I came across one magazine called "Small Quilts" -spring/summer 2004 edition and came across one pattern that I just fell in love with.  "A Star is Born", was originally an orphan block quilted by reader Deborah Hersko from Spokane Wa..  She had sent in her paper pieced block to a recent orphan block challange.  Sr Editor Jean Ann Wright took the block and added lovley borders to the block which resulted in this sweet 12" mini quilt.  I took a look at the pattern and thought of the bag of scraps my friend Elaine had given to me...(I love to collect scraps from my friends.)  There were some pretty christmasy scraps in there I could use.  I copied the templates and choose the fabrics.  This was the my 1st time working with such small pieces.  I liked the results but I found that the pieces did not lay flat so I used some spray starch and gave it a light press with a dry Iron. This did result in a nice flat piece as shown in the 1st picture above. 

 

I found using the small templates and the fabric rather difficult so I decided to Spray starch my fabrics before cutting them with a dry Iron.  I am also thinking of making a template using this piece of mylar I had to see if I could be more presise in my piecing.  I will let you how well this works for me