Farmer's Wife QAL - #100 Weathervane

I got my paper-piecing templates last night, all 111. Yes, that's a lot of paper! The first one I pulled out of the box was #100, Weathervane.

The paper-piecing templates provided for this block on the Yahoogroup are so counter-intuitive as to be pointless. Seriously. DO. NOT. BOTHER. I paper-piece quite a bit, and would have put this block together in the manner that the book indicates: by piecing the central square and then adding on the pieced HSTs. The paper-piecing templates I downloaded have you piecing in strips, then futzing with Y-seams to inset four of the triangles.

URGH. WHY?

So, I went to my copy of EQ7 and redrew the block. Weathervane, as presented in The Farmer's Wife is a fancied up nine-patch, meaning it can be broken down into a 3 X 3 grid, so re-drawing it was easy. I've reset the groupings for paper-piecing to make this go together much easier. I've also set the templates page and rotary cutting instruction into PDFs for easy use.

PAPER-PIECING -This file maintains the original seams as the book.
ROTARY CUTTING -This file maintains the original seams as the book.
TEMPLATES -- This file maintains the original seams as the book.

I'll be back later to post my completed block.


Okay. So I attempted to piece Weathervane keeping all of the original seams in place. Now I'm asking myself just why in blazes anyone would WANT to preserve all of that unnecessary piecing! There was so much bulk in places that my sewing machine balked. *sighs* Back to the drawing board, luckily for those of you who haven't come across this block yet.

My solution is as presented at left.

Download the updated file here.

I'll leave the other up, in case people really, really want to go through all those extra piecing steps...

I'm going to continue going through the harder blocks in The Farmer's Wife and post my updated paper-piecing foundations here and on the Flickr group.