Mai hairplane!

Pattern: Fly with me by I Heart Linen

I finished my first ever paper-pieced pattern! It's a little wall hanging for Isaac. He calls it "mai hairplane!" I love that he says everything with an exclamation point.

Paper-piecing is not so bad. I did not follow the directions and cut the pieces based on the templates, I just cut scraps that I thought would be big enough, thinking that would save time and be less fussy. Turns out that's a good way to waste a lot of fabric and time. Next time I will either use the template or cut scraps much much bigger than I think they need to be. I also had some trouble wrapping my brain around the fact that I was putting the fabric on the wrong side of the paper and sewing on the right side of the paper. Sigh. I unintentionally reversed a few pieces, and had to redo them. I think I also unintentionally mixed up the ordering of the background fabrics, too.

Even with all my mistakes, this took only an afternoon. And I was super happy with it until I washed it. One of the batiks bled and stained the white fabric. Sigh. It wasn't even the dark batiks that bled, it was the lightest one - third from the right. I used the same fabric to bind a quilt made with other not-pre-washed batiks - it was a block of the month quilt, pieces were distributed by a local store precut and not pre-washed. When I wash the block of the month quilt I will definitely be using color catchers, and maybe retayne or synthrapol.