To Boston with Love

The Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild is coordinating an effort to show support for Boston.  “To Boston With Love” is a collaborative effort of makers to bring peace and love from far and wide.  What’s being planned is a public exhibition of flags strung into banners that will be displayed in Boston – hopefully by early June 2013.  If you’d like to participate, the details are here and you can see others’ flags in this Flickr group.

I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to try Rose Hughes’ Fast-Piece Applique technique  again, but this time with the freezer paper on the back (rather than the front) of the fabrics.  I first used this technique for hearts on neutral linen, and I decided to use similar fabrics and designs for my Boston flags.

Here are my finished flags, from the front and the back.

Putting the freezer paper on the back of the fabrics has 2 major advantages:

1. It’s much easier to see how all the fabrics will work together before sewing the pieces together.
2. The trimming of the seam allowance on the front does not require lifting up the freezer paper.

The disadvantage is that your subject will be reversed, but that didn’t matter with these hearts.

I tried piecing the hearts two different ways.  With the green and pink hearts, I placed the hearts on top of the background fabrics when piecing them.  With the yellow and orange hearts, I positioned the background fabric on top of the hearts.  Here you can see the blocks from the back after they are sewn, and you can see the background seam allowances on green/pink block, and the heart seam allowances on the yellow/orange block.

From the front, it doesn’t seem to matter which seam allowances are trimmed, especially once the seam edges are covered with zigzag stitching.  Here they are before the zigzag stitching.

I decided to zigzag through both layers of the flags – to give some interest to the backs – and it meant I didn’t need to use stabilizer.