Wheel of Fortune is doing my head in!

I was very pleased with my first Jen Kingwell cushion (which I haven't blogged about yet) and I decided that I would make another cushion for my friend as a house-warming gift.  This time I chose Wheel of Fortune and it is my first foundation paper piecing project. 

I found a gorgeous black fabric with embossed shells to use as the background for the cushion. My friend (who is also an artist) has just bought a house that overlooks the beach and I think that she will enjoy the contrast between the black seashell pattern and lots of coloured fabrics in the wedges.

I don't normally cut all fabrics before I start to sew. But this time I gathered as many decent size scraps as possible from florals, stripes, dots, very modern brights, country, Christmas, novelty, Australiana, Aboriginal and even a couple of solid fabrics. I then cut between 2 and 4 strips from each fabric to ensure that I have a lot of variety.



Then I got on to the nitty gritty of foundation piecing having first traced and then photocopied the templates onto foundation piecing paper that my friendly local patchwork shop gave to me!  This is my first attempt at paper piecing and my first block was not a great success.  



I don't think I traced the wedges accurately and after photocopying (which slightly enlarges them) the block just didn't work.  So I retraced all the wedges 16 times on the back of the foundation paper because I only had 5 sheets and couldn't risk throwing them away!

The next block is much better.



Piecing the smallest background template onto the wedge is very frustrating.  I've been doing lots of unpicking and its doing my head in.

I may take a leaf out of Wendy's book and hand piece the small background to the wedges.  My biggest irk at the moment is that I can only work on this during the day because of the black background.  My eyes just can't handle this at night.

So, one quarter block down ... 15 to go!  Finish date is fast approaching (yikes).

Hubblebird

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