WIP Wednesday - Roses Quilt Begun

I've started a new quilt, with a rose theme. I downloaded Rosie's Rose Paper Pieced Quilt Block from Craftsy.com.

The pattern's finished size is 6", but I wanted it to be bigger, more like 8" square or 133% of the original size. I tried several methods to enlarge the pattern with various computer programs, without much luck. I finally came up with printing a plain 6" square from Electric Quilt, taping the normal sized pattern section into it, scanning, then using Picasa to crop and print the square at 8.5", the width of a normal piece of printer paper.

Left: normal sized pattern section taped to 6" square.

Right: Scanned, cropped and printed so that the 6" square is now 8.5".

(I'm deliberately hiding the centers of the patterns, since the download is not free.)

Here I added 1/4" seam allowance to the edges of the pattern section, then marked the "corners" in red to avoid confusion later. I did the same process with the three remaining pattern sections, fitting them into a separate 6" square and enlarging. I printed the enlarged patterns onto tracing paper, which is transparent and pretty easily removable at the end of sewing the paper-pieced block.

I created a design in Electric Quilt sketch. Here you can get a rough idea of the finished quilt. Roses will look different than the simplified flowers seen above.

Fabrics - most from stash, along with a few new pieces

My plan is to mix up the combinations of fabrics so that each rose is somewhat unique.

I'll begin sewing in the next couple of days. The pattern is rather intricate, so I expect it will take several days to get the paper piecing done.

Debbie