Playful Paper Piecing: Eiffel Tower

"Eiffel Tower," 8.5" x 15", made by Pam Geisel, May 2016

This month the Island Batik Ambassador's are creating pieces using paper piecing.

To be honest, I'm not that fond of paper piecing. I find that I tend to over estimate how much fabric is needed and then I end up cutting the extra parts away, which I think is wasteful. Perhaps if I did it more I'd get better at estimating. Also I like to chain piece when piecing, which saves on thread. But you can't chain piece when you are doing paper piecing!

It is a good technique to know how to do, and it is helpful when you want to be precise. I used paper piecing once when I was making a custom piece that had 27 log cabin blocks. Each block was 15 logs across and each log was only 1/4" thick. I don't think I could have done that any way other than with paper piecing!

Not sure what I wanted my subject matter to be, I looked over my Island Batik fabrics then went searching on the web for paper piecing patterns, I ended up buying this Eiffel Tower pattern designed by Jennifer Ofenstein of SewHooked.com.

I ended up using fabric from the Wind & Sea collection. I used the mostly solid lime green, bright blue, and light purple for the tower and I used a multi-colored piece for the background that had all three of those colors on a navy blue background.

Even though the original design had one color for the tower and one color for the background, I decided to alternate the colors and give it more splash. And I liked the movement in the background, like they could be fireworks going off around the tower.

I also added a small row of blue seed beads near the top and also some lime green and blue seed beads in the middle of the tower for some bling.

I usually like to face my art quilts but there was a binding fabric that I used that was just the right color. As I've done recently when doing a visible binding, I like to couch a piece of yarn in the binding seam. This time I used a lime green yarn.

I've never been to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower, perhaps someday.

You can click on any of the photos to see them larger.

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