Wrong season!

Please don’t misunderstand.  I am not ready for winter just yet.  In fact, fall can wait a little bit as well.  That said, I did jump ahead in my sewing room this week.

This block idea has been simmering in my head for over a year now.  I wanted a six-pointed snowflake for a particular quilt. I’m not sure why I was so determined for it to have 6-fold symmetry like a proper snowflake.  I’m perfectly happy with vague representations of other objects in blocks, but my brain was determined.  I fussed in EQ on and off  and finally figured out how to section the block so paper piecing would work.

My other discovery was this tutorial from the Oregon Coastal Quilters’ Guild on paper piecing with freezer paper. The tutorial calls it paperless paper piecing.  I found the link on a blog a while ago and bookmarked it.  Now I wish I could remember whose blog it was so I could thank the blogger for sharing the link.  I’ll be using this technique again!

Here’s why I like it.  Compare:

On the left:  traditional paper piecing, where you have to tear away all those little bits of paper when you’re done sewing.  Plus you need one foundation for each block or section you sew.

On the right:  simply peeling away the freezer paper template, which can be reused a few times (I managed 6 times). By folding the foundation and sewing beside the fold, you never sew through the paper, though in all other ways this works like the usual paper piecing.  I won’t repeat the instructions here as the tutorial I linked to is very clear.

I would add that I found it helpful to fold along all the “sewing” lines on the template to crease the paper in the right places before starting to add fabric.  Once fabric was involved it was easier to fold the freezer paper in the right place when there was a crease to guide the folding.  This will make more sense after you’ve seen the tutorial and tried this!

This wonderful technique was not responsible for the piecing glitches and resulting trimming and fudging required to fit my snowflake sections together.  That was due to careless scaling of the block.  It really does help to set the block printing options to the correct aspect ratio when I print out the foundations…  Ooops!

I’m off to print the templates again (with the proper settings) to make another snowflake and confirm that fudging is not required to make it work.  While I’m at it, maybe I’ll play around with more snowflake designs.  After all, every snowflake is unique, so I really shouldn’t have three of the same design in one quilt, right?

Linking up with Let’s Bee Social at Sew Fresh Quilts