Lucky Stars: Beginning Adventures in Hand Sewing

When I first started piecing, I used a black ballpoint pen to mark my fabric and then used a combination of a running stitch, a back stitch and machine sewing to put it all together. It was a huge mess, but the fabric did hold together. By the time I realized my ink would probably run everywhere and ruin the project I had a pillow-sized piece of patchwork. I was so disheartened I jumped to machine piecing and english paper piecing (EPP) and didn't try the running stitch again for years. 

I'm happy to announce my fear of the running stitch has happily ended. I've started Lucky Stars from Millefiori Quilts 3 by Willyne Hammerstein and so far it has all been pieced by hand with a simple running stitch. I've bought silk pins, and frixion pens and everything is going quite smoothly. I'm really enjoying hand piecing so far, it's a lot faster and needs a lot less prepwork than EPP. 

Here is my progress so far. I've finished sewing all of the "x" shapes. Now I just need to sew 32 stars

I'm struggling to keep all my stitches even but I assume that will improve over time. Also it's interesting to iron hand pieced fabric. The little shapes all seem to need to be ironed in different ways. It makes an interesting pattern as I go.

Here's how half the stars will look like. Note that the star is made of a straight geometric pattern, while the outer squares have smooth curves. I think they create a very nice secondary pattern. 

Until next time 🖤

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