Paper Piecing Large

I'm Home!  I have been to Annapolis (MD), Palm Beach (FL), Austin (TX), home for 4 days, Seattle (WA), through Grand Teton NP (in low clouds and rain!), and finally home for the summer.  One funeral, three graduations and great fun with family and friends.  Coast to coast in a car.

I took my sewing machine in for its annual check-up.  All is well.  It has accomplished 1,158,894 stitches in 13 months.  You needed to know that, right?  It has now been relegated to a storage shed so my sewing room can be repurposed as a bedroom for a week for a visting granddaughter.  My sewing room is so squeaky clean and uncluttered that I don't recognize it.  I still have a fusible project of my little dog to work on until company arrives, but won't need the machine for awhile.

Reporting in.  A few weeks ago I showed you a computer-generated spiral for my next quilt, and was concerned about getting the paper piecing accomplished.  The problem is that the spiral is 18 inches long and my Sulky Paper Solvy is only 11 inches long.  I ended up digitally "cutting" the pattern and printing it in three pieces.  I cut those pieces roughly and aligned all the lines using the dotted lines as guides.  Then I fastened them together with surgical paper tape, turned it over and cut off the overlapping edges.

Pattern printed, cut apart and and ready to tape together

TIP:  You could butt the edges together if you want, but I find that it is easy to miss perfection when taping with this method.  Even a slight misalignment could skew the whole spiral.

Wearing my Senior Tester hat I grabbed some stash fabric and paper pieced the reconstructed spiral.  It worked beautifully so I can enthusiastically recommend this method.  I confess that I had some of the tape on hand, but haven't looked in the pharmacy to see if they still sell it.  Note to self:  check it out.

Tester stitched.

Sew a happy seam this week.