I wanted to make his teacher a small art quilt or mug rug and searched online for a bagpipe quilt pattern. I found one on Heleen Pinkster's site. It is from a previous block of the month series and can be purchased now. She doesn't email or let you download a pdf. You pay and she sends out a notecard with the pattern folded up inside of it. The notecard has a picture of the finished block.
I will warn you... the block is one solid piece so you have to cut out the pieces, making sure you get all the sections correct and mentally add your seam allowances. There is also no color chart which was disappointing to me but in the end it isn't all that hard to figure out what color needed to be what. If this pattern needed more colors though it would have been pretty frustrating to figure out what needed to be what color. For me it was a small price to pay. Heleen's designs are awesome and worth the extra prep work of cutting apart each section and figuring out what color needs to go where. I wrote all of that down before starting the sections to make my life easier.
Warning... the pieces are small.. and I mean small. I actually blew this up a little bit so that it would print to fit the paper... T his was my day 1 progress. It doesn't look like much after 3 hours but then I made a few mistakes, was socializing etc...
I don't shy away from tiny paper piecing but my friend who was sewing with me on day 1 thought I was nuts for attempting this.
yes, I'm a stickler for getting those points to match. There is one spot on the drones section that doesn't match up right. It annoyed the living daylights out of me but I had to get over it and move on. In the grand scheme of things, one missed matchup isn't the end of the world. Too bad it ended up pretty much dead center in he finished project...
Before I bound it, I basted quick corners for hanging. I find it easier to baste them down than to pin them. I've had quick corners go wrong when I've just pinned them so baste them puppies down!
Of course I used my binder attachment. I also learned that I should probably check to see where the joining seams are before binding something. That is a story for another day though.
We gave it to the bagpipe teacher and he was just in awe of it. It took a long time, 7 1/2 hours all together but so worth it. This man has taken time out of his week to teach my son to play the pipes and he has yet to let me pay him. We have disrupted his entire family's life and caused them to have a late dinner most Tuesday nights. I also gave his two grand daughters a token gift each. They have a full house there.. daughters and grandaughters and now one 11 year old boy who has adopted them on Tuesday nights.
I think this was time well spent. It will bring Mr. Parker lots of joy. He apparently collects bagpipe stuff and this is the first quilted item he has ever gotten from the sounds of it, let alone a small quilted bagpipe quilt to hang.