when I was a little kid at some point I got upset with my parents because I didn’t have a crucifix in my bedroom and they did- I was like why do YOU get to be safe from vampires??? you’re okay with me getting my blood sucked???? so we took a little trip to the catholic store but the one closest to us was run by a group of nuns that had been moved here from romania. I got a little baby pink cross and this sweet old nun was like ‘aww, is this a baptism gift?’ and I was like no. I need to be protected from vampires. and she immediately got SO serious and was like 'this is the best one we’ve got, you’ll definitely be safe’ and since she was literally from vampire land I was convinced she was like, van helsing. like the whole time my parents had been laughing about how cute my fear was but she literally Knew dracula and was taking my concerns seriously I held this over my parents for so long lmfao
An Exploration of Large Scale Foundation Paper Piece Quilt Designing
Aka
Cozy Swords So Big
I made this quilt for a sword enthusiast, I’m sure they would clock inaccurate sword proportions right away. It was important to me that the (non magical) swords be as proportionally accurate as possible. I based each blade to hilt ratio directly on historical or famous prop references (can you spot them?) and designed them to be life sized.
A very sweet boy’s tail for scale against an early pattern draft
The most challenging part of constructing this quilt was working on the RIDICULOUSLY long blades. Typically individual pieces of an FPP pattern are small and easily maneuvered. My largest blade pattern pieces were about 45 inches long, a design decision I would never inflict on anybody but myself.
The smallest blade- the only one I took photos of because the rest were way too overwhelming to document. The largest pieces were triple the length of this.
Designing the blades to be contained in a single piece of each pattern maximized precision in the parts of the designs that I really really wanted to be smooth and sleek.
The long blades were very hard to construct, it’s easy to end up with bubbled fabric on FPP pattern pieces so large. Glue stick and spray starch were critical here.
My only totally impossible sword was designed in a more traditional fpp kind of way, broken into many small pattern pieces. There was a lot more room for error in seam matching, so this block took me much longer to complete than any of the others. I redid quite a few seams to get as close as I could to perfect.
Overall I loved how these large scale FPP designs turned out. I think the result was worth the hassle of working with my comically large pattern pieces.
ALT
