Monday 17 September 2012

Amalie's Patchwork Ball QAL#1

DQ Amalie is from Denmark, but very much a Desi. An amazing person, she pieces all her quilts by hand! She shares with us here a couple of techniques of whipping up instant gifts for li'l people...patchwork balls. Over to Amalie..

Patchwork ball tutorial
Supplies needed:
Fabric of your choice, needle, threat, scissors, card paper that is a bit more stiff then normal paper but soft enough for a needle to easily go through it, Filling for ball old/new pillow ( I cut the pillow open and use the filling to stuff the ball.

In this tutorial I will go through 1 version with pentagon pieces and then give ideas to what other versions with triangles, hexagon and squares etc.you can do from the same idea.
I make these as English paper piercing, but it can be done on machine by following the same basic idea.
This could be a great scrap project, since you just need 12 small pieces of fabric. The lazy method when using paper piercing is to cut square pieces, But for machine quilting you should cut the pieces into pentagons. All pieces should be ¼ inch bigger than the actual size to give room for stitching.
The size of the pentagon’s depends on how big a ball you want, the one in the below picture is 1½ inch on each side.

Start by loosely tacking the fabric to the cardboard pieces. Like in the picture below.
Do yourself the favor of using thread that is a contrast to the fabric color then it is easier to pull out the thread in the end.
After having stitched the 12 pentagons it is time to put them together, always stitch with the right sides of the fabrics against each other.
Stitch at all the places with arrows so that you end up with a half bowl.
Do this again so you end up with 2 half bowls.
Now it is time to stitch the 2 bowls together to 1 ball.
Hold the two parts right side against right side and sew all the way abound so that you have one round ball, only leaving a small gap open. (one side of one of the pentagon’s)
If you are using paper piercing now it is time to take out the paper, carefully cut the loose stitches that has been holding the fabric to the paper and take out all the paper pieces.
Fill the ball with filling and stitch the last hole so there are no more openings.


Alternative patchwork balls: To make sure no copyright laws are broken I have just shared a picture of one I have made and links to other versions of the patchwork ball :
Source: My own picture

Have a ball!
Amalie

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