Fresh, new techniques for foundation paper piecing on Fresh Quilting with Elizabeth Dackson (109-3)

[Music] hi I'm Elizabeth Jackson I'm a quilter and I love to paper piece it didn't always happen that way though paper piecing was something I kind of fell into by accident and after trying it a lot of times and having a lot of not so nice words about paper piecing I've come to love it paper piecing is the kind of thing that takes a good bit of practice but I'm here to help you with it today when you paper piece you're actually going to sew through the paper through the fabric to make some really precise angles and beautiful blocks so let me show you a paper piecing template that we'll work with today this paper piecing template shows you lines it shows you angles it even has some markings that you'll see in my lovely chicken-scratch handwriting that remind me what colors go where these are just some mental notes to self to help me remember what fabrics I'm using where I'm using some lovely solids so I've written to myself what colors go in each section you'll also see that there are notes about letters and numbers these indicate to me which sections get sewn and placed first so for example a1 is the first section that I'm going to be placing and I've written this note to myself here that pink is the color that I'm going to place there next is going to come a to whichever it in gray and so on and so forth as long as you can count 1 2 3 4 you can pay per piece one thing you'll notice about this template is that there are lots of words and letters and numbers and then on the flip side of the template is absolutely blank the flip side of the template is where we're going to put all of the fabric that's where the magic happens now to get started we're going to flip this template over and get started lining up the fabric now usually I'll use natural light for that but for this particular demonstration we're going to use a lightbox if you happen to ever stumble upon a lightbox for a good deal it's super handy to have in your sewing room for lots of purposes paper fusing is a great example for that so let's go ahead and head over to that lightbox and take a peek now like I mentioned before the fabric is going to go on the flip side of this template so if we flip this guy over we can still see the lines of our template coming through you can mess around with the brightness of your light box so that you can see this a little bit better or if you're using natural light in your sewing room you just pulled it up to a window or if you happen to have a really bright lamp or something along those lines you can use that as well I have a light on my sewing machine you know one of those like book light type of things that you can use for that purpose so pink is my first color so what I'm going to do is I'm going to place the pink fabric right over top of this a1 section here you'll see that a 1 and a 2 meet one another I'm going to go ahead and line is right over top of that and thinking about what I know about sewing I know that a1 and a2 are going to meet and there's going to have to be some seam allowance here so I'm leaving enough fabric to cover that seam allowance if I think back and think about my seam allowance knowledge I know that 1/4 inch or so of fabric needs to be here so I'm just folding back to make sure hey that looks like about a quarter inch I've sewn long enough to know about what that looks like I don't need to measure it nor do you once I'm sure that I've got that lined up just so I take a look at my template to remind myself what color is a 2 again oh hey it's great I've got my gray fabric right here all ready to go line that up with that nice raw edge because like I said before I've got that quarter inch of fabric right there ready to go for me and that's where my a 2 fabric is going to get lined up now this is the tricky part the very first scene that you put into this particular template going to lock everything else in place you can use a pin to hold this fabric in place personally I don't tend to use pins a whole lot because it tends to wrinkle the paper which then can wrinkle the fabric my sewing machines right here my two thumbs pretty good and steady so I'm just going to go and hold nice and tight bring it right over to the sewing machine now if I line things up right like this I cannot see my line which really important that you take the moment and think about what you're doing to flip that template over can make sure that those lines are facing you the lines are your guides there's no need to pay attention to your seam allowance on your sewing machine in any way shape or form because those lines on your guides here on your templates are all that you need to make sure that your sewing nice and straight I'm going to go ahead and sew along this line I have however on ahead and shorten my steam allowance are sorting my shorten my stitch length I should say because when your pant refusing it's important to shorten that stitch length I'll tell you why have you ever tried to tear paper think about it we're using just regular plain old printer paper and what we're doing with that shortened stitch length is we're literally perforating the paper as we go with the needle by doing so we're going to make it much much easier to go ahead and tear that paper when we're all done so now that we've found that very first seam we can go and bring it right back over to the lightbox and you'll see that my fabric you know quite line up perfectly straight what its close enough we can open up that seam I'm going to finger press it to make sure the things are nice and straight you can also set the scene with an iron flip it nice and open and so now we've got a nice perfect little seam right here I'm going to go ahead and add on a three the same way and just take a peek to check out what color we're doing we're adding dark purple as my note indicates to me I see my line is right here now when I flip this over I can't really see the line so great so what I can do is I can go ahead and fold back that fabric and give a nice crease to my pink fabric once I find where that quarter inches you can also use rulers to do this step for you or like I said you can hold that fabric up to a nice light source once I find that quarter inch I can line up my purple fabric like so bring it on over to the sewing machine and give that nice seam a good so okay I'm using a nice lightweight sewing thread for this because we're paper piecing so it's really important that we add as little bulk as possible it's actually a paper piecing thread it's really designed for this purpose so it's really perfect for this kind of application so now this is the first time that we're dealing with this we're actually having a good amount of bulk here in this particular seam so we need to get rid of some of those so we are going to just use a handheld scissor to trim some of this excess away you could use a rotary cutter I will tell you having taught this to many many Sohus over the years I've seen a good number of people cut into their templates with a rotary cutter so I don't tend to recommend that if you're just getting started with paper piecing I'd recommend that you stick with just the regular scissors for a good long while until you get used to paper piecing all I'm doing here is adding on the next section or so which is my next section my gray section I'm checking to make sure that I've got enough fabric to cover the a4 section then I'm going to add on a5 in just the same fashion so that we can get to trimming these templates because that's where the areas where folks tend to get tripped up in paper piecing a lot of times when your paper paints mean you tend to work with really unusual shapes and angles and that can be really tricky to deal with it can be a little bit intimidating I know that when I started paper piecing that was one of the things that I struggled with most is figuring out how do all of these puzzle pieces come together to create a square because when you look at this particular shape for example it certainly does not look like it's ever going to turn into a square it certainly doesn't look like it's a triangle it looks like it's got a shape lopped off well it does and you'll see in the project sheet for this particular project that there is a second template that you'll work with that ultimately turns this particular template into a traditional right right triangle that ultimately when sewn together with another matching right triangle can create a square and then ultimately for those guys put together will create a finished block so once we're finished showing that a template together we get this lovely really not so super attractive block or template I should say it doesn't really look like anything yet because we haven't trimmed up so let's go back over to the cutting table and see what happens when we trim so when we trim when we trim any paper piece block one of the things that's really important to understand is that what we're doing is we're trimming off excess fabric to come to a finished size to do this we have to flip the finished piece over if we don't do that we can't see what we're doing we've got to be able to see those lines so we're always going to be sewing on that wrong side of the paper but trimming and sewing on the printed side of the paper so you'll follow these dotted lines to trim up your finished templates let's go ahead and grab the ruler and rotary cutter to go ahead and trim this up so it'll look just like this finished example right here that's the bar roller over so we can actually see what we're doing I will tell you that having done this for a long time I always measure from the from the dark line here that surrounds each template just in case my printer is misbehaved and printed things at a size that is not quite what it should have done just in case that dotted line does not quite measure out as a perfect quarter inch and one more side and you'll see that the corners are not so that you don't have to have dog ears you can take the moment to trim those or you can skip over those whatever you prefer and I'll so let me finish out with a nice lovely trimmed template and you'll repeat this process for any paper piecing template that you wind up with ultimately once you flip these guys over you'll see that these guides repeat in the finished block over and over again and you can alternate colors make any color choices that you want to finish up a lovely block like this here are some other examples that you can see where I've done some other additional paper piecing you'll see lots of beautiful triangle arrow shapes you can do just about anything with paper piecing and I hope that this tutorial has really helped you understand the basics of paper piecing you [Music]

Channel: ksproductionstv

Views: 69,438

Keywords: Elizabeth Dackson, paper piecing, Brother International Corporation. Grace Company/Truecut, rotary cutter, mat, PQ1500SLPRW, Northcott, solid color fabrics, lightbox, The Modern Quilt Guild, Fresh Quilting

Id: 9KyImHuxrgM

Length: 10min 24sec (624 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 15 2017