Adventures in Paper Piecing

Paper Piecing.

The words just put fear and confusion in my head. No matter how many times I read the directions, it just made no sense to me. I finally went to youtube in search of a tutorial that made it click for me. I found one too!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uaW26igygE&feature=fvst

Finally, something I could see that made sense to me. It's not that I've never foundation pieced, I do that for string blocks and I've used Thangles, so the paper didn't bother me. It was the how do I figure out how to cut the pieces for paper piecing to work. The first block I tried, I did wrong and had to start over. I ran short in one pointy section. Now I've made a couple of paper pieced blocks, and I'm doing better. It feels good to finally be developing a skill I found intimidating. Last year my goal was to do some free motion quilting, and I did quite a bit of it, and this year I learned to paper piece.

See this carnage? It is the remnants of ONE 12" paper pieced block. It was a pretty complicated block, at least to me. I can't show you the finished block yet. In a few months I will. I'm doing some testing for something not published, so I can't show anything until it is published and available.

I have been working on a couple more flannel quilts. I'm so glad I'm coming to the end of that flannel! I'm hoping by the end of the weekend, I'll have a good bit of the rally quilt sewed, and the flannel quilt tops finished. My goal is rally quilt first, then the bags and cool ties. I'll be finishing the flannel quilts as leaders/enders. One needs borders, and the other two are in rows.