Paper and Pineapples
It was finally sunny enough to take some pictures with good lighting for this post. Today is all about Paper Piecing!
What is Paper Piecing? This is when you have a printed out pattern on regular old paper and you literally sew your quilt onto the pattern. Why in the world would you do this? Precision! Here is how.
Here is my pattern known as the Pineapple block. (I don't really know why...) So I need to go from the paper pattern on the left to the finished product on the right.
These are my tools.
The fabric I need to cut for this is just these 3 colors into a bunch of 2 inch strips. I will cut them down as I go.
So let's talk about this bright pink ruler and what makes it so important. As I talked about in a previous post, quilting involves a quarter inch seam. This is a pattern where making sure you have a perfect quarter inch seam is VITAL! This little pink ruler is why.
If you look closely at this, it has a little lip on it that is exactly a quarter of an inch. The ruler is literally called "Add-A-Quarter" for this reason.
So to start, I have cut a 2.5 inch square for the middle of my block and glued it about as close to the center as I can. Here is where the ruler comes in. To perfectly center this block, I am going to flip the block over and fold the paper on the line that outlines that middle square like this.
I then pop that ruler lip along the edge of the folded paper and trim off the excess fabric. What does this do? This makes it so that when I sew on the next piece of fabric I will be sewing on the line that is printed on the paper. Bear with me.
I need to sew on my first layer of white. So I have cut some smaller pieces off of my big strips (these do not need to be perfect) and am ready to sew them on.
One strange thing to remember about paper piecing is that your stitch length needs to be super small. I have mine set to 1.5 verses my normal 2.4. I will explain why this is important later on.
Now I can sew on my pieces.
Since I have them cut perfectly, I do not need to stress about the fact that I cannot see the line I need to follow. Sine I have that perfect quarter inch seam, it doesn't matter.
I have attached my first piece sewing approximately from one end of the printed square to the other. If you go a little past this line that is fine.
Here are all four pieces attached in the first layer. It doesn't look like much of anything right now. That's because I need to fold and trim the same way I did to center my middle square.
The back side looks like this after the first layer. You can see that I have that perfect square that follows my fold lines. This is what I want! Now I just need to fold and trim.
We need to fold on the diagonal lines that come next in the pattern. This is what it looks like. Here comes that handy pink ruler. I pop it on along the folded line and trim off the extra fabric.
Once I do this to all 4 sides it looks like this.
TADAA!! On to layer 3.
Here we go. Now folding and trimming.
The back has another layer of sewn lines that follow my folded lines. Great! (I should have used a colored thread so you could see it better...)
Ok. So a whole bunch of layers later and I need to throw on the finishing corners. I cut some 4.5 inch wide strips and am cutting them down to 90° triangles.
Every good quilting ruler has these handy lines that make cutting angles really easy. Now I just pop them on.
To make the trimming easier, I glue down these corners so I don't have to worry about them moving around when I am not looking.
For the record, gluing fabric is not a big deal. As long as you use a washable glue stick, you are good. I shamelessly slather it on.
Now I just trim off the excess one last time.
You can see all those folded and sewn lines. They match the printed pattern exactly.
And that's it! I just need to make 20 of them...
But back to why that small stitch is important. Since I don't really want to have a whole layer of paper inside my quilt, that small stitch creates fantastic perforations in that paper so I can peel it all off without damaging my seams.
Many of you have been liking this quilt on Facebook. Thank you so much! I love it too. Keep in mind that I can do this with any colors or even the same ones if you are thinking of one for yourself.
Thanks for reading!
