My technicolour dreamcoat

I have a lovely stash of colourful reclaimed pieces of silk and a wonderful assortment of pretty embroidered and beaded bits waiting patiently to be used and admired in something special. Well, I have a project in mind for both. I am going to make a silk patchwork jacket and sprinkle the sparkly bits sparingly around. These are the colours I am planning to use; mostly turquoise, blues and purples.

Here are a few of the beaded bits.And this is the pattern I am going to use. As simple as I could find as i don't want the problems of collar and lapels, pockets or darts.

I don't know if this is anything like sane quilting paper piecing, but this is how I am going to do mine. I used four squares to the inch squared paper and cut strips of 3" wide. The seam allowance is 1/4" which is one square wide. I started by cutting lengths of one, two, three, four, five and six inches, 3" wide, out of the squared paper. I cut the same out of the silk using a rotary cutter. Later I changed to using pieces of silk a little larger than the paper piece just so that the silk would stay straight. I pinned and tacked the silk to the paper, sewing in between the paper edge and the first printed line (approx. the 1/8" mark). This is so when I machine sew the pieces together later, I am not sewing over the tacking line. Then I trimmed the pieces to match the paper pieces.

This is an ongoing project and I'll update my progress as it happens!