Paper Piecing

I love paper piecing. I love the precision that come from having lines to guide me, I love the shapes you can make that are nearly impossible to get otherwise- I just love it!


My New York Beauty- the "spikes" are paper-pieced.

What I do NOT love about it is all the @#$% paper you have to sit and pick out at the end! So I sat down one day and figured out how to do it with freezer paper. I knew there had to be a way to use the stickiness of the freezer paper to keep the fabric in place. Then you could fold the paper back and sew beside it. I worked for HOURS, and I did figure it out... and the very next day, I found this tutorial from twiddletails!! Go look at it- it's really great! I wish I'd found it BEFORE I did hours of work figuring out something that someone else already did- and posted free to the Internet :)

In the tutorial she uses a regular ruler, lining it up at the 1/4" mark. I HIGHLY recommend the use of an "Add-a-1/4" ruler- they are available at most quilt shops. It has a little "lip" that you can put against the paper. It makes paper-piecing so much easier!!

Here are some paper-pieced items:


My "Nor'Easter" Storm at Sea quilt. It's started. It's not much past this point, to be honest! I have 2 quilt retreats coming up this fall, and this is the project I am planning to bring to both of them.


A block I recieved in the Sweet Dreams Quilting Bee. Lovely example of the interesting patterns you can get when you paper-piece! This block would be extremely difficult to piece any other way.


The start of my "Park Slope" curvy log cabin. I am paper-piecing the log cabins using the method in the tutorial. Loving it so far!

We have bad, bad, really bad storms headed towards us. Have I ever mentioned that I HATE thunderstorms and bad weather? There have been too many close calls with tornadoes this summer... and by the looks of it, I can only hope we dodge any that may come today, too!