Stitch, Spring 2011: Fabric Nesting Bowls

You might not naturally put soccer balls and Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilts into the same category, but they actually have some similarities: by using pentagons for some of the pieces instead of hexagons, you can make a round ball instead of a flat quilt. Or, in this case, a bowl that (I think, anyway) looks kind of like a six-petaled flower.

After sewing these up, I can understand the addictive nature other English paper piecers have described—it’s perfect work for in front of the TV or on the go. And the bowls are kind of functionalist in that the “paper” conventionally used in English paper piecing gives the bowls their structure. But you’ll have to check out the spring issue of Stitch to see what I’m talking about!

The sneaky trick the magazine doesn’t reveal, though, is die cutting: for the medium-size bowl, cut the interfacing with the Ellison 2" hexagon die (or the $5 clearance version!) and 2" pentagon die and you can save some tracing of templates. Then the larger and smaller versions just offset the edges of those pieces by ¼" either way. You could try using the three different sizes of hexagons on the AccuQuilt Go hexagon die; just make the bottom edge of the pentagon templates the same length as the corresponding hexagon.