Gandalf

I am a huge fan of J.R.R. Tolkein. (Okay, so I'm a huge fan of Lord of the Rings. I tried reading a couple of his other books but struggled too much to keep all of the elven names straight. My husband however does qualify as a HUGE fan of Tolkein.) When I saw fandom in stitches was planning on doing a There and Back Again Block of the Month I was excited. I mentioned it to my husband and he immediately agreed that I needed to do it. I've been sewing for years, but am very new to quilting. I've never tried paper piecing before, but read a lot of tutorials and figured it shouldn't be too hard. For my first attempt at paper piecing I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

I tried something a bit unusual with the fabric. I really wanted him to have a dark grey coat, a medium grey hat, and a light grey beard. Rather than buying three pieces of fabric when I only needed a little bit I found a dark grey piece of fabric and used bleach to lighten it.  When I got my fabric home I decided it looked more black than grey so I put a large piece in for the cloak for five minutes, a small piece for the hat in for ten, and a small piece for the beard for fifteen minutes. The beard didn't turn out and I used a piece of white for it, but I like the effect the bleaching had on the cloak and hat. 

I apologize for the lack of pictures in this post. Since it was my first time doing paper piecing and bleaching of fabric I was more concerned with doing it right than documenting what I was doing. November 2 month 2's block is released. I'll try to take more pictures of the process as I work on that one.