Mariner’s Compass Mania

Somehow I diverted from this week’s plan….laundry and cleaning my studio. Well, perhaps not quite, but what I meant about cleaning the studio was tidying up and now I have made more of a mess. A basket of UFO’s caught my eye and I started digging through them and look what I found!

I took a class in Judy Mathieson‘s method of paper piecing the Mariner’s Compass pattern at the Houston show many years ago. Who doesn’t love this dramatic pattern? I made lots of them and then I taught classes in how to do it and each time I did I allowed myself to start a new one. Yikes! Here are a few to show you.

This one hangs on the wall in the stairway going down to the basement/studio. I called it Stars Over the Buttes because that background fabric looks just like the buttes in Colorado. (The color is really off and I can’t get it adjusted properly…)

This one

is part of this one! I was working on a large pink and orange quilt top and then we moved. At a later date I needed a class sample and I knew the store where I was teaching would love this color combo, so I cut this one out. (And I’m not sure what I will do with the rest.) I did take the time to do some “Piping Hot Binding” on it, which I learned from Susan Cleveland. Click on the quilt photo to see it.

This was an interesting color idea… For those of you who don’t know about the construction of a compass design, here you can see 4 pieces of the compass. Each wedge is one point and then it’s paper pieced in some way. It’s a lot easier to make than it looks and really, really fun.

This is the compass UFO that I did remember that I had. I call it Dotty for Dots and all the fabrics are (and will be) dotted fabrics. I have a large collection!

This compass I thought would be fun to finish as a circle. I don’t like the middle I pieced though, so back to the machine for that!

Believe it or not, I have a few more completed compasses stored away. After I finish some of these UFO’s I think I should be “done” with this pattern!