Awhile ago I took another class at the local quilt shop. This time is was on paper piecing. Have you ever tried it? It’s not the easiest thing to understand, but once you get it, it’s not really hard, just time consuming.
The lady that taught the class brought in her scraps for us to use, that way we weren’t as nervous about messing anything up. Holy cow did she have a lot of scraps! I bet she had almost more scraps than I have of fabric! But as you can probably tell in the picture, she doesn’t have my style in fabric so it took me awhile to decide on what fabric to use.
The picture on the left is supposed to be a flower (the bottom is the top left corner) and the one on the right is a tree. Could you tell what they were before I told you?
With paper piecing, you actually sew with the material on the back of the picture and stitch on top of the paper where the image is. When you are done, you then remove the paper.
So, for this image of the flower (from CompuQuilt) you start with block one and two and place your fabric on the back with rights together but with the back of the number one fabric toward the paper. Then flip it over and sew on the line that is between the one and two spot.
Instead of trying to explain this in too much detail I’m going to have you visit this link to a video which explains it much better than I could without any pictures. The video is almost ten minutes but she does a nice job of explaining exactly how to paper piece.
I did find other ways online on how to paper piece, but that video shows you the way that I was taught. Let me know if you know of an easier way!
6 Responses
Paper piecing looks like it takes great patience! Good job!
I’m going nuts!! I just want my machine back!! Oh well I will survive, at least I found out that it was only minimally my machine that was the problem. Mostly of course it was operator error.
Blah!! I just want to finish this project!! I don’t even want to attempt paper piecing at this point, too complicate.
I learned to paper piece years ago and it is fun. The pattern you showed above looks like a more complicated one with all the angles to start off with. the god thing about this type of quilting is that everyting is uniform and blocks will be the correct size and look the same if you do mulitples. There are some great free patterns online too. If you blow one up or do a larger sized pattern you can make them into pot holders and they make great gifts.
The one of the left looks similar to a log cabin quilt. The one on the right does look like a tree, however.
How do I get a pattern?
I took a class at my local shop for this, but I’m guessing you can find something online. Maybe search tree paper piecing or flower paper piecing depending on which one you liked.