Just Ducky

I was lucky enough to have another fine Saturday spent with Melissa de Leon Mason, this time in a class she taught for BAM on "Designing Your Own FPP." Which is Foundation Paper Piecing or just Paper Piecing. Which I don't do much of, or like all that much, but I am always intrigued by the innovative pictorial pieces people come up with these days. It seemed like a good thing to learn, and maybe if I was paper piecing my own design I'd like the process a bit more. 

Of course I neglected to plan ahead and have a printed out picture of my own to work from for the class. So on the bathroom break, I took this photo of a small rubber duck that lives in my bathroom. 

Thankfully, since I was taking the class at home, I could easily just print my picture out. For whatever reason it went edge to edge on the copy paper. Funny how different it looks in black and white.

I cropped it down manually with a ruler and scissors. Wow, so old-school of me, right?

Then I traced out the main elements that I wanted to capture in my FPP design. Good old tracing paper, still coming in handy after all this time. This simplified abstraction from the photographic image will hopefully make this FPP-able. 

I scribbled in the colors with colored pencils just for my reference. Then I decided on the segments that I'd have to break the whole up into to more easily accomplish FPP''ing the image, marking off the segment lines with red pencil.

 Then it was time to cut the tracing up on those red lines and glue each piece down separately to add 1/4" seam allowances to each segment. The hard part, and what the class really covered in-depth with lots of great and clearly explained examples, was how to go about figuring out the lines that you actually end up doing the sewing on. 

More on this later as I try to actually make this thing in actual fabric...