As I mentioned last week, I took a paper piecing class at the quilt store last Friday evening and all day Saturday.  The pattern is a Judy Niemeyer pattern and holy cow, you can’t believe the detail!  It took me three hours just to cut out the fabric - with supervision.  I didn’t have to figure out what to cut, it took that long just to do what I was told!  The pattern we did is called Christmas Celebration and is a tree skirt or a table topper.

Here is the sample the woman teaching the class made - just to give you an idea of what I’m talking about here.

I chose to make the tree skirt and I wanted mine to look pretty much like the sample.  The pattern uses batiks and has directions for piecing everything - the background, the large triangles … the whole kit and kaboodle.  I just couldn’t handle that much piecing, and I really like the way this one looks, so I did the minimalist version.

This was my first experience paper piecing, and I was a little nervous about what I’d gotten myself into.  In fact, when we were cutting I was seriously thinking I’d bitten off way more than I could chew, eyes bigger than stomach, crazy as a pet coon … the list goes on and on.  I found out that paper piecing isn’t hard, but it is time consuming and requires you to be very detail oriented.  Which isn’t so much a problem for me.  I’m sure that doesn’t surprise any of you.  We started by doing the flying geese.  For those of you non-quilters out there, the geese are the little triangles that go around in about the middle of the skirt. We got one section of geese done in the class, and here’s what mine look like …

The benefits of paper piecing include perfect points and it allows you to make your geese go in something other than a straight line.  So, aside from the time it takes to be exact, it wasn’t bad.

After the geese, we moved to something I thought was a bit easier - the spikes on the outside of the skirt (they’re plaid in the sample).

The tree skirt is put together in 8 “wedges” and in each wedge you have a right and a left spike segment.

We finished one of each on Saturday.  On Sunday I worked on the pattern a bit more and thought that since the spikes were the easiest, I’d start there.  I completed three more sets on my own and in the process cemented the paper piecing steps in my head … I hope.

The last part of the class was reserved for the center.  The center of each of the 8 wedges is done in two parts.  These were by far the most difficult, just because of the long spikes and the somewhat less than logical assembly.  However, everything ended up going together well.

We are meeting as a group again in mid-November to learn how to assemble the pieces into the wedges and then put those together.  Apparently, there are some tricks to it.  My goal is to have all of the pieces done by the time we meet so I can put it together and have it quilted before mid-December when I put my tree up.  I don’t know if I can do it, but I’m going to try.