Making BIG "made fabric"

I've been working on a project that needed made fabric.  And I needed a lot of it.  Since the made fabric had to cover large areas, I decided to use big pieces of fabric.  Big for me is anything bigger than 4 inches wide!  Even 4 inches seems "big".   Compare "big" with my usual bits in the picture below.

I tried different ways to do it and refined my technique as I went along.  I have been using made fabric in quilting for some time now, but if you need inspiration or directions on what to do be sure to get Victoria's new book, 15 Minutes of Play.  It is chock full of ideas.

First I pieced the fabric together free form.  This took a lot of time and I was never sure just how much of my "area" I was covering.

Then I tried paper piecing - actually sewing onto newspaper pages.  That worked ok, but I found the paper slipped easily on the  sewing machine, so that some of the pieces did not lie flat.

Finally I simply used a sheet of newspaper as a template and took fabric swatches and lay them over the paper in various angles. That gave me a good sense of how much fabric I needed to cover the paper.  Then I could mark my seam and cutting lines of each fabric (with soap) so that I could maintain the angles I set them at.  I found I could manipulate sections of made fabric that were about the size of a sheet of newspaper, so I made about l5 sheets worth of made fabric.

just a fraction of the made fabric I needed.  

So  what now?  I'll show you tomorrow!