Little Red Riding Hood Placemats: Getting Started.

I've wanted to try paper piecing for a while, but like many was scared of it. It just looks so intimidating! I came across a set of etsy patterns from Cyrille @ BubbleStitch Quilts that I thought was kind of cool.

I really just didnt want to drum up another quilting project with so many in the hopper, but I kept finding myself thinking about the patterns. Then - a light bulb went off! There are three main blocks here and I just so happen to need three place mats for my triangle shaped table. Serendipity no?

I knew my place mats needed to be finished about 13"x19". Since these are square blocks, it doesnt easily convert to place mats. I fired up photoshop and did a little copy/paste to get an idea of what it would look like if I extended the squares into rectangles to get the finished size. They looked pretty good - so I ordered the pattern and got started!

After I received the patterns, I thought the trees looked like they might be the easiest to start with. Besides, I needed three panels and it's always good for me to get the repeaters done first. I'll tell you - I'm pretty impressed with myself considering I've never paper pieced anything!

All in all, I dont think paper piecing is that hard. It looks scary when you see the pattern with lines everywhere. Like anything though - if you take it one line at a time, it comes together! I did make the same mistakes several times:

• Not using a big enough piece of fabric OR using a good size and not turning it at the right angle to cover the whole piece
• Putting the first piece on the WRONG side of the pattern, which means it's backwards!
• Matching up the pieces to get all the corners in the right places
• Remembering that I need to include a seam allowance OUTSIDE of the printed pattern. 

I did create myself a little trick to help with lining up the pieces. First I put them about where I think they are supposed to be and stick a pin through each corner of the printed pattern -

I turned it over to see what part of the pattern they were touching on the back. If it wasnt the corners, I re-adjusted it try to make them match and put the pins back in until it looked like this on the backside -

Next, I used a really long basting stitch along the pattern line

That was really a lifesaver. It's super easy to remove the long stitches if it isnt lined up quite right and then try again. Pulling out those short stitch was NO FUN for sure!

Another thing that I found made a night and day difference for me was to layout the pieces before I even sewed the first stitch. The pieces make much more sense to me when I've seen them put together.

I bet those of you that are experienced with paper piecing have lots of really good advice for me right? While my little tricks seem to be working pretty well for me, I bet there's a ton of others one out there! Feel free to leave them in the comments!


Oh!!!!

Why, it's Little Red Riding Hood
Hey there Little Red Riding Hood
You sure are looking good
You're everything a big bad wolf could want
Listen to me
Little Red Riding Hood
I don't think little big girls should
Go walking in these spooky old woods alone.

There - now you can sing it as many times as I have working on this project! :D

Linking in with Freshy Pieced WIP Wednesday. 
Linking in with Really Random Thursday.