Thursday, November 20, 2014

Foundation Paper Piecing Pillow Tutorial

Hi Friends!

Sorry it has been a while... Liz and I got sidetracked from the quilting blog for a while, and by "sidetracked" I mean we were doing very important things like traveling, taking care of our families, and giving birth (congratulations, Liz!). No biggie, right?

I have had this project finished for a while and I'm happy to finally be putting it on the blog!

This was my first experiment with foundation paper piecing. If you have no idea what that is, I suggest you go check it out on YouTube. The first free tutorial I ever watched on it was this one by QUILTY. Nice and easy and step-by-step for a beginner like me.

After watching that, I designed a block which I call the starburst block. It is a 6-inch block and the free PDF is on the PDF Patterns page of our blog as we speak. The PDF pattern will be free only until January, so download it now if you want to do it later.

As for the tutorial, I am debuting it through Southern Fabric's blog. Here is the link. After January, I will republish my tutorial here. Thank you again to Aubrey Marshall and the kind folks over at Southern Fabric for providing the awesome Cotton + Steel fabric for this project!




It just so happens that this was also my first project for which I utilized FREE-MOTION QUILTING! This is such a fun technique to learn and practice. I'm totally hooked. See how the quilting stitches are going in several different directions, forming various shapes and patterns? I did all of the quilting on my home domestic machine, with the help of a $5 used free-motion foot in place of my regular presser foot. This allows the fabric to be moved in any direction as you sew, rather than the conventional front-to-back direction of travel.

I hope you guys enjoy learning a few new techniques as much as I did!