Paper piecing presentation

Here is my presentation from the May meeting of the Modern Athens Quilts guild:

And here is the handout I passed out.

There are some exercises at the bottom–here are the answers and some more detail on making your own patterns, since we didn’t really go over them much, if at all, in the meeting.

Piecing order

Keep in mind that there is often more than one correct answer! This is definitely the case for these two blocks–for example, in the second one you could sew each set of triangles of the same color in any order you liked.

Drawing your own block

Here’s a little more detail on that.

The lightning bolt you’re trying to piece here would have some inside corners if you tried to just sew it with two pieces of fabric, so we need to break the block up into as few pieces as possible while eliminating inside corners. In this case, we will need to break it up into major sections because there are inside corners on both sides of the shape. Start with the major section lines:

Now the rest of the seamlines are easy!

So when you piece, you will piece this block in three major sections.

If you were thinking it would be four, notice that the top lefthand corner piece is just one piece of fabric that can be sewn with a single straight seam–so you can just leave it with the section below it, and there will be less section-piecing hassle later!

So here’s your final block, numbered: