That's what friends are for

Paper piecing is something that always left me wanting to tear out my hair;.I always did something so dumb that I often couldn't even figure out how I could have done such a thing. If I ever had to paper piece, I complained and grumbled endlessly. When someone in our Friendship (block swap) group gave us a log cabin foundation that she had copied on the copy machine I was worried I would end up bald. It was a little bit off in the sizing because of the copy machine so that I couldn't print another foundation from EQ without first figuring out the size of the blocks and strips. When I finally got that right and printed it I made a really stupid mistake on the last log, not once but more than once. I ended up picking out all those tiny stitches because I knew if I did it over from the beginnig I would be likely to make the same mistake again.

 Well anyway, fast forward a couple years. I get togeher with several ladies who are talented and creative. We get together in the basement of one of the group and learn something new and fun. Someone brought instructions that she got off the internet for drawing a migrating geese block in Electric Quilt. It was just stuck in with some other papers and I found it when I got home. I played with it in EQ and drew out a paper piecing pattern and thought that this was something that I wanted to do enough to make me paper piece. I spent a whole day making one mistake after another and threw the whole thing away. When I said I would swear off paperpiecing, Kathy came to my resue. She said she would teach me to paper piece the next time we got together and SHE DID.

This strip was going to go in a larger piece using blocks from the books "Beyond the Block" and "Collaborative Quilting"; that is our latest basement project. I looked at it yesterday and decided that I wanted it to stand alone. I sewed the borders on this morning and I will quilt in the ditch around the geese.