Paper Pieced Union Jack Mug Rug, Day 3, Part 1

An Englishman and a Welshman walk into a bar...

Miss Darcy took an extra long nap this morning, so I was able to complete most of the paper piecing today.  The first thing I did was to change the stitch length on my machine.  Shortening the stitch length, in addition to using a large needle, will create more perforations, which in turn will make it a lot easier to rip the paper foundation off once you've finished sewing.

Normal stitch length on top,
shorter stitch length on bottom.

With paper piecing you are repeating the same steps again and again, but in different areas of the paper.  Your first step is to secure the first patch of fabric onto the paper, wrong/private sides together, making sure to cover the area marked "1."  Some quilters use tape, but pins seem to work best.

Oh, happy daggers?

Then you take another piece of fabric, place it on top of the first patch of fabric, sew these pieces down, trim your seam allowance, open up your sewn piece, take another piece of fabric, and repeat until you're finished!  Easy, right?

Well, of course there's a little more than just that, but that's the general idea.

After pinning down the area 1 fabric, grab your second piece of fabric.  You need to make sure that there's enough fabric to cover the next area, in this case, area "2," and also enough for the seam allowance.  I'm sewing a 1/4" seam allowance, so my second fabric scrap needs to be big enough to cover the area and have a 1/4" more all around.  I like to have a little more than that just in case, and besides, you'll be trimming away all that extra fabric anyway.

Place the fabric so that the right/public sides are together.  Once you've secured this piece, flip the paper over and sew on the line between areas 1 and 2, with about 1/4" to 1/2" of stitching before and after.  Fold back the paper to the sewn line, and trim down the extra fabric to a seam allowance of 1/4".

Open up your just sewn piece and press.  You can press with an iron, but I just used my built-in pressing tool (aka my index finger).

Then you move on to the next area and do it all over again!  It really is that simple!

But of course, even with something this simple, I managed to mess up.  After sewing down area 3, instead of trimming the seam allowance down first, then opening up the sewn piece, I opened up the fabric, THEN I sliced away.  You know what happens then?

You get a perfectly trimmed strip of folded fabric on your block exactly the size of your seam allowance on one side, and the extra fabric scrap, as well as the rest of your "sewn" piece, detached from the block, on the other.  Sigh.  "Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast."

So I ripped the small strip from the block and redid the section.  This is why it's a good idea to have a little more fabric than you think you need, in case you are as hasty as a Romeo wanting to marry his Juliet, or a Sunnygal being, well, herself.

I continued on through the pattern section, placing, pinning, sewing, trimming, (then) opening, and pressing, all the way to the last numbered area.  On one side I have a paper pattern full of perforations and thread, and on the other...

a perfectly pieced block!  All's well that ends well!  Now we move onto the other pattern sections and continue on in the same way.