Apple Core Quilts

Aren't these smashing??! They are a few images from my inspiration collection (and might be slightly blurry as they were from the Internet but I can't remember which websites) and can only mean one thing...a new project is in mind!

The Mother bought me 100 Apple Core paper pieces for Christmas and I thought that now the hexagon quilt top was done, I needed some more little and portable bits to play with on the bus or at work- these fit the bill nicely!

Having never done curved paper piecing before I thought I ought to practice before getting down to the real thing, drawing my own template to cut the fabric shape from- and giving myself a very wide seam allowance!

I watched a few Youtube videos on how to do curves and had a practice with both of the techniques I found. The left hand technique was to simply do a gather stitch and pull the fabric round the paper template (wouldn't work that well with thin paper pieces I shouldn't think) on the outside curves, and then snip and fold over segments for the inside curve. This was OK but the running stitch never gets the fabric as tight to the template as you would like it to go and it feels slightly baggy on the other side.
The second technique (on the right) was to just snip everything in segments- don't snip right up to the paper, leave a couple of millimetres so that it doesn't show on the other side- and stitch them down bit by bit. Which is my preferred method I think, there is more control and it looks neater at the front.

Do you see what I mean about the bagginess? It is quite hard to explain.

There isn't really a lot of obvious difference from the front although I think the lines of the right hand one look cleaner (that's the one with the segments all the way around).

So the next step in the practice run is to join these two pieces together! Which is actually surprisingly more difficult than you would think. You have to stitch from the middle and work outwards to both edges, and if you haven't aligned them properly to start with there is a lot of cursing under ones breath and unpicking because the wavy outline doesn't match up.

Eventually I managed it though! Quite chuffed with myself actually.

With my new found apple core-ing confidence I then spent the other evening cutting out lots and lots of fabric. I am thinking of doing a sort of rainbow/colour gradient thing with greens and blues and turquoises. It is a good excuse to buy some more fabric I think- some shades are missing!