Learn to paper piece, and your points will never be pointier!

At first, I taught myself, but then one of my good friends taught me and I am getting better at it. I really love to do it, but it is so different from traditional chain piecing you have to retrain your brain!

Every time I do paper piecing I have to go back to a tutorial and check again what goes which way up, and it often takes me a false start to get going on it again. That said, I love it - crisp, perfect points and there's something very satisfying about gradually adding the pieces to the block. And I LOVE taking off the papers! (some people are made happy by very small things :-)
My favourite tutorial isn't a video one, but I find it very clear:

http://www.winnowing.com/ppp.html

ok...forgive me for my confusion on this one....but I thought paper piecing was where you had a piece of a block that you stitched, usually by hand, the pattern to, folding over the seam allowance.(like hexagones for Grandmother's Flower Garden quilts) Then you stitched the pieces together, again usually by hand, to form the block. Or is this just "English paper piecing"? I though the type of piecing where you used the pattern all drawn out on the paper and stitched the fabric to the "wrong" side of the paper was called foundation piecing.

Maybe the terms are interchangeable?????

At the top of this page, there's a link for paper piecing basics...I read it and it looks like it might be a good one. Has anybody bought this and if so, was it a good teacher??? I'm trying to decide whether to buy that or Carol Doaks book, can anybody advise??? Thanks as always, Wendy

There are actually three different techniques that you have just described. Foundation piecing, English paper piecing and Paper piecing.

English Paper Piecing and 'regular' paper piecing are two different animals from what I've been told. I do believe that EPP is all handsewn but I won't swear to that. Only learned that much taking a serger class a couple of months ago.

So what is the difference in "English paper piecing" and plain ol' "paper piecing"?

If the difference is English paper piecing is done all by hand....and plain ol' paper piecing is done on the machine....then what is the difference between plain ol' paper piecing and foundation piecing???

don't mean to be a bother here...but I am really confused :shock: :shock:

OK, English paper piecing was described earlier, you baste pieces of fabric to a shape, like the Grandmother's flower garden quilt. Then with the paper (stiff like cardstock) still inside that perfect shape, you whip stitch them together. When all are stitched together and all of the shapes are perfect, you take out the basting stitches and the paper. Foundation piecing can take a few different forms. The ones that I have done most recently are slightly different. I am making the "Roll cotton Boll Roll" Christmas mystery from Bonnie hunter and one of the blocks used an 8 1/2 inch piece of paper as the base and then we sewed "strings" of fabric to the paper right sides together, flipped them out and kept doing that until the square was filled, on the diagonal. Then I flipped it over and squared it to 8 1/2 inches and then removed the paper from the back. The reason you use the paper is for a basic shape and for stability.
I also took a class from Edyta Sitar and her foundation papers are printed with 1/4 inch seam allowance, so you sew with the pattern and the fabric on the same side. You line up your piece of fabric, that is cut exactly to size with the seam allowance line and finger press it out as you go. This works especially well for pineapple blocks. It was so fun and oh so precise. This will also work for other paper piecing, but you have a lot of figuring to do before you start sewing. Without a visual, I guess it's hard to conceptualize.

Thank you for posting that video. Very interesting! I never would've guessed that's how you do it. I thought you had to make a bunch of copies, then cut out each piece separately with a quarter-inch seam allowance. Her method definitely saves paper!