Foundation Paper Piecing - how to

so we have our pattern and I've chosen vellum mostly just because you can see through it so that you can see what I'm doing here I like the caroled of paper in the vellum about equally because I like the way they rip so in our bib we're going to chose to do a little fussy cat motif because I've got a cute little rabbit for the center of my bit and when you cut your pieces for paper piecing it does not have to be precise at all it just needs to be larger than the space you're going to cover it and I just I started cutting it all off a little bit then I realized I don't need to cut the rest of it off so I'm just making sure that the line that I'm going to be within that this piece is bigger than that it could be hanging off in all directions it doesn't matter this is this part is very non precise and you can be rather sloppy if you want or if you like to be a NEET then you can do that as well so the thing about paper piecing if you can get the very first step if you can understand it you can pretty much get it because I find that the first step is the most difficult we're always going to be working from both sides intermittently the side that I've printed on you can see that that's much lighter this is the printed side and I ran this vellum through my inkjet printer this is the side you're going to be stitching on and this the side that you're going to have your fabric on and when you're finished the back of this is going to be the finished top of your block which means right sides up so wrong side of pattern - wrong side of fabric is one way to think about it okay so I know my piece is large enough I'm going to flip it over and I'm going to lay my I'm holding up just enough so that I can see some light coming through I'm in a well-lit room and if you can see my lines are right there and I just want to make sure that my bunny is centered in the middle of it and that I'm covering I have enough fabric all the way around to make sure that all of the initial solid line is covered and it is so I'm going to pin it so just to double-check I've got my motif is centered in the center section of centerpiece one and the next spot I'm going to sew is the space between one and two on that stitch line but before I do that I'd like this piece to be the right size I'm going to trim it down now and I'll show you how to do that so once in a while when you are working on a technique there's a tool that you just can't live without a lot of times you can get around it with paper piecing I really feel strongly that you can't get around this one I struggled with paper piecing for years and really didn't like it at all until I learned how to use this proper properly it's probably at 1/4 ruler comes in two sizes actually three sizes this is a longer one and it also comes in add 1/8 so that if you're looking looking at mini quilts really really tiny seams you don't have to have quite so much seam allowance basically this adds a quarter inch seam allowance on each of your little template sections the other necessity for the tool is free that is a magazine subscription card that comes out of any magazine or any kind of card stock but you know usually somebody's got this around so those are the tool tools of the trade that are necessary so I'm going to use this is that I want to trim my block now remember I said that I'm going to sew the seam between sections one and two I'm going to just get it into position for myself and I'll do this several times so if you don't get it the first time don't worry about it but once you get this little step you will have mastered paper piecing so I'm going to lay my card on the line that's between one and two that's going to be my stitch line I'm going to fold it back and I'm just finger pressing it making sure I'm online then I laid the quarter and see if you can see that just nudges right up against there very snugly and I'm going to cut off my family so now I have my seam allowance already when you're done with this which whole paper is going to be very folded up but you can see that I actually have a quarter inch seam allowance under there now I can go ahead and do this for all of my steps where I can wait and do it later but I'm going to go ahead and do it now so that you can keep watching me so I know that after I finish that between one and two I'm going to be stitching between one and three this ruler does it exactly a quarter of inch but if you slip don't redo it it's not necessary as long as you've got enough seam along so the project doesn't come apart see how easy this and let's see I need to do five and there are more I'm cutting a lot more because this centerpiece has a lot more angles okay so I'm now going to put my fabric in position for my first scene so I know that I want this fabric to cover the space for number two and again I'm not pre cutting this very fancy I'm just making sure that I have a piece of fabric that's large enough to cover the section metal number two now my my easy rule to remember is just like you are when you're regularly sewing you want right sides of your fabric together so remember I told you here again this is the very first step so it's very hard to remember but you want wrong side of fabric to wrong side of pattern after that forget that rule from now on I'm going to be doing fabric that's right sides together if you're doing an odd shape just kind of eyeball it like that just to make sure that you really do have enough effort to cover it but I know that this piece is plenty big enough now again you're going to be flipping back and forth quite a lot I'm going to pin this one just so that it doesn't flip around so that you can see what I'm doing but when you get the hang of this you really don't have to pin so I've adjusted my stitch length already I want a finer stitch than I normally use and I've changed my sewing machine needle so that it's a heavier needle the 90/10 and I'm always going to be stitching with another rule you need to remember you're always stitching on the side where you can actually read everything the side that you printed on so just refresh your memory I laid my fabric down so that I was covering the right up to the seam allowance so that when I flip this back it'll be covering the number two spot flip it so I'm just going to stitch right on the line the pathline just a bit through two stitches when I take that pin out and again once you get the hang of this you don't even need to pin so I stitched the line between one and two and I went ahead and stitched the line number three as well just because it doesn't overlap or touch number two in this particular case so now I'm going to trim it using my postcard or my subscription card so in this case I want to finish section two so I'm going to put my card on the outer line of to use my nifty ruler trim it save that piece for a lot of segments the same thing with section three and adhered this is a bib so it's just one one whole unit but what I like paper piecing for the most is when you're doing something really small like I one of my favorite things to do are tiny little flying geese because I don't I'm really not a very good piece or and I can get nice tiny points with this method and so if you're doing assembly line you do all your number three's then all your number fours and you just do your stacks and you can get strip sewing very quickly for the purposes of demonstration here I've already gone ahead and done two three and six because I know that they're all the same color and I know that they're not overlapping normally you want to make sure that you're doing them in the proper order so that anything that's overlapping is done correctly but I don't want to confuse you but because this is a big pattern and I'm showing you how to do the actual bib pattern I want to do it the way I would do it so next I'm going to cover number four it's also with blue and notice that it's going to overlap two sections so I'm going to stitch on that line and I'm just to pin it there I do like to pin once in a while just because I know that it won't shift when I flip it over at all and now we'll go stitch it so I am NOT a perfect paper piercer and I made a mistake when I pulled this off I realized I completely missed covering my seam here so when you have to rip remember you have this very tiny seam stitching so you don't want your paper to fall apart on you so if you use scotch magic tape it releases nicely it doesn't damage your paper just take off the print a tiny bit but that's okay so I can print put that over it before I rip out my stitches and then the the scotch tape actually ends up being my foundation paper for when I risø that scene so I'll go fix it and come back so when I'm ready to go trim up the number four I have sewn over other seams we didn't see this perversion now because we weren't we hadn't gotten to the point of overlapping anything but I want to show you what happens when you are ready to trim up a seam where you've got any one or two overlapping seams so I'm going to go to the four and notice it's it's contact because I've got stitches just be brutal and just pull it back see how you can see that it's not going to hurt anything that stitches are really tight I'm ready to trim that up now and I'm going to show that to you again five that was where I made my mistake so now I'm going to trim the five and there's some stitching so I'm folding where it's not stitched see how it's there just give it a Yank that's all you have to do now I'm back on the line don't worry about that stitching because it's secured by the other rows that's nice and trim so I'm going to keep on going you just keep going and going until you're done you're pressing along each time you go I sometimes use a finger presser but I prefer an iron because I get a crisper Essene if you don't press it well you might end up with a little bit of extra fabric in there that you don't want and you just keep flipping and sewing and trimming flipping and sewing and trimming and the really the key is to trim each time cut pieces just bothered me so I'll go ahead and trim it right now number six funny and you have less to stream if you pre cut your pieces more closely I tend to be a rather sloppy paper piercer as you can see and so I use bigger pieces because I don't really want to take the time to pre-cut so I've gone all the way around so that I've completed the blue I've got some more trimming here and I just want to demonstrate that again where you you have some seam allowance there that needs to be kind of tugged on so I'm folding back see how I've got one once I came this automatically but the other side didn't and I'm just going to carelessly yank on it and it's it you've got a little paper stuck there but it's going to come out later and it's no big deal don't be afraid to give it a touch so I've done a little bit more piecing around here just so that you can see that the design is taking shape you might ask why paper piecing and I want to point out I wanted to get enough of this going so that you can see how skinny this little blue action is the the best patterns for paper piecing are where you've got small pieces that you don't want to piece like you're like on your own I'm going to just point out that that little blue section it's three eighths of an inch wide and that's really tiny if you are going to be cutting adding a quarter inch seam allowance and trying to handle those skinny little pieces and a lot of times paper piecing is really tiny little pieces so that's what this is best for you have a really big piece you know you probably it's probably a waste of paper but when you're looking at fine detail and sharp points and odd angles any kind of an odd angle it's really great for that as you can see on this pattern we've got all kinds of angles there's going to be a triangle there when we're finished we're going to have another piece out here and this is a really perfect example of paper piecing so that you can get those skinny little scenes without having to worry about all the pre cutting so it's really fun and I'm going to go finish this bib now

Channel: ConnectingThreads

Views: 487,635

Rating: 4.7972875 out of 5

Keywords: FPP, paper piecing, foundation piecing, demo, beginner

Id: Xv2gKMx9CCM

Length: 13min 50sec (830 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2010