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Since today is the day before Valentine’s Day, what better than a quick heart project?
I decided I wanted to do a paper pieced heart for the front of a closet door. (I already have the larger Valentines Day wall hanging.) I ended up at Marcia’s Crafty Sewing and Quilting. She had a free pattern for a paper pieced 7” Crazee Patch heart. I wanted it a little larger than 7” so I enlarged it to 10”. The only problem with that is that I felt it needed one more piece in the on the right side, so I added one.
Paper piecing is pretty straight forward, except you have to do it upside down. The easy part is you follow the directions for the order the pieces are put together. Since I added one more piece, I had to adjust the order of the piecing.
To begin, you place piece 1 and piece 2, right sides together on top of the pattern about 1/4” past the sewing line for pieces 1 and 2. You don’t have to be exact here. Having a light box or a strong lamp helps with this. Set your sewing machine for a stitch length of about 1.5. You will be tearing the paper back off and you don’t want to pull the stitches too much. Another thing. It helps to pin the two pieces together at the stitch line and flip the top one over and to make sure it covers the area it’s supposed to when the fabric is flipped over. This is pretty easy with the first piece laid down, but the one that is on top can easily be cut short. My suggestion is to cut generously.
For sewing you can pin the two pieces in place if you want (not on the stitch line). I usually don’t, but then you turn the whole piece over—fabric on the bottom, paper on top, and sew exactly along the line that is shown on the paper. It is good a idea to back stitch a couple of stitches starting and stopping. Remember you’ll be pulling the paper off. Now turn everything back over and iron the two pieces flat against the back of the paper. The side that doesn’t have the design.
I’ve found the best way to continue is to go to the next line where you’ll be adding a piece and fold the paper back exactly on that line and using a ruler cut the previous fabric 1/4” past the sewing line. That way you can just place the next piece on top, right sides together, raw edges matching, and then flip the whole thing over and sew on the line again. If this seems hard to understand, I’ll have video links below.
When it is all sewn together, it looks like this from the back where you did all the sewing.
Now you carefully pull the paper off. This is why you did short stitches to make this easier. The front looks like this:
After final pressing on a wool mat, some quilting, and binding, this is what it looks like
Some tutorials for paper piecing, also called Foundation piecing, are below:
I’m also going to add a little plug for my ebooks that are speculative fiction with strong women characters. Check them out here.Hopefully no one minds.
