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Saturday, 4 May 2013

My very First Paper Piecing Block

I was surfing the net the other day and saw a beautiful quilted block on Pinterest. Thought to myself... oh I'd love to be able to sew like that. SO I put the question out in our QQQ Team on Etsy, asking how is something like that done and got a few really helpful answers.
This is the quilted block I saw and fell in love with :
http://pinterest.com/pin/5981411977882379/
One of my Etsy friends, Patricia Caldwell of The Butterfly Quilter, said I should look at this site : http://www.averyspecialcollection.com/freepatterns/howto.pdf and another friend steered me towards 
Soma of Whims and Fancies ....who does a LOT of paper piecing.. she has a web site :  http://www.whimsandfancies.com/ where she holds paper piecing hops every month :-) Very interesting... Also she has a paper piecing pattern tutorial for beginners called the School House...

Donna of June Bug Quilts posted a link to a video on Utube : www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNzg78tsF7g that shows paper piecing.... all so very helpful, thank you All!!!

Anyway I digress, I sat down with a cup of hot Bovril, don't do coffee and I've run out of Green tea with Mint... so Bovril it is. and started reading.. I looked through that school house pattern and thought.. Wow that sounds quite simple, but I don't want to do a school house... hmmm Next I looked at the link that Patricia had given me... ummm well a tad more complicated I thought, till I started! 

I had to draw my own pattern out, so I made it an 8 inch block against the 4 1/2 in the pattern. I needed something BIG to start off with.. Then I had to choose my fabrics... that took a wee while and eventually I started...

All I can say is that IT'S TOTAL FUN :^D !!!
This is the outcome :

Of course you should mentally cut off the 1/4 inch seam around the outside edge to get the outside pointy bits be the same as the rest..lol  AND I didn't hand sew the brown handle onto the fan.. i sewed it with the machine... I didn't realise at the time that I was doing that bit wrong.. but I still sort of like how I 'fixed' it..I think I'll change it later though..  hehe 
It's nowhere near the first photo, but I think it's a great start.. don't you?

4 comments:

  1. Your doing great. Once you figure out how to paper piece it becomes a little addicting! So glad you tried it! Looks great from here! LOL

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  2. Yes Patricia, you're so right.. I loved doing it and now want to work out how to make that block I love... could be interesting.. LOL :^D

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  3. I love your first paper piecing block, Sylvie!! Welcome to the club :D

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  4. Thank you Soma :^D I am kinda addicted already, lol.
    I've joined Lorin's Block swap that she'll be doing monthly and so I can now experiment again. :^D

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