Sunday, August 28, 2011

Quarter Trim Paper Piecing

How's that for a name?  I have been doing paper piecing for a while and I don't think I use all of any one technique.  I've put together a tutorial for my version of paper piecing and I thought I should give it a name.
These are the tools that I use for my paper piecing. 

A couple things I forgot to include in my tutorial is the settings on my sewing machine and the paper I use.
My machine defaults to 2.5 when I turn it on.  When I am doing paper piecing, I turn that down to 1.6.  At 1.6 my paper tears away easier and is still possible to rip it out with a seam ripper if I should make a mistake... no one makes any mistakes... Right!!! 
There are all kinds of paper out there for this purpose, but I use the common 20# paper that is used in most printers.  Once I am ready to rip the paper off the fabric, I fold on the stitch line and carefully pull to start the rip... most the time it rips off fairly easy.  Occasionally I might need to use a pin or tweezers to get out some little scraps of paper, but that is not the norm.  I recently found that I could print on paper from a doodle pad.  That is newsprint weight paper that is in a pad for kids to draw on.  It has to be trimmed to fit in the printer, but it does go through my printer fine.  I printed on this paper for a friend who wanted a lighter weight paper.  The doodle pad had 60 sheets and it cost $1.84... so it was pretty cheap.
Oh yes, I have to give you a link to the tutorial... Quarter Trim Paper Piecing
There is one other note I should make regarding how big to cut your fabric pieces.  You will typically have a little more waste with paper piecing because you want to have a little more than the 1/4" seam allowance on all sides of the piece, and making it even bigger is not an issue.  The area that I have the biggest issue with is triangles or angled cuts... sometimes when you flip the triangle over into place after you have sewn it down, it doesn't fit the way you thought... so it is worth double checking before you stitch triangle pieces down if you don't want to use your seam ripper.

No comments:

Post a Comment