Paper Piecing
Foundation pieced quilts, sometimes called paper pieced quilts, are made by sewing pieces of fabric onto a temporary or permanent foundation.
— quilting.about.com
Paper Piecing. It’s what I do. I play at crafts and I crochet to relax, but paper piecing is what motivates me, inspires me, and makes me want to keep creating. It’s addicting, frustrating, and incredibly rewarding. I love to design, to piece, and, when I get the opportunity, help others learn, too. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!
How To Paper Piece
- Complete How To Paper Piece Tutorial on Sewhooked
- Adding seam allowance to a pattern that doesn’t have it
- Practice Paper Piecing from Quilter’s Cache
- Paper Piecing Tutorial from Such A Sew & Sew
- Christine Thresh’s Paper Piecing Primer
- Paper Panache How To Paper Piece
- Basics on About.com
- Learning to Paper Piece on Artisania
- Sewing More Complex Paper Pieced Patterns on Artisania
- How to Paper Piece video in Italian by Gaya
Designing Your Own Patterns
- Thoughts and suggestions on designing without quilting software with Drawing A Patchy Heart from Sewhooked.
- Quilt Assistant - Free Quilt Design Software, great for designing paper pieced patterns. Read my review of Quilt Assistant here.
- Electric Quilt 7 - for purchase quilt design software
My Original Paper Pieced Patterns
You are welcome to use any pattern or project for personal or charitable use or add links on your own website. If you have any questions, please contact me. ~Jennifer
- The Sewhooked Shop for PDF patterns
- My patterns on Craftsy (PDF)
- My Etsy Shop (for hard copy patterns, please contact me if you don’t find what you’re looking for.)
- Free Quilt Patterns on Sewhooked, includes patterns designed by myself and Guest Designers
- The Project of Doom - A Block of the Week Harry Potter Mystery Quilt (also archived here on Sewhooked and here on Fandom In Stitches.
- Fandom In Stitches - a collection of Fandom patterns designed by myself and the FiS Designers
Free Patterns and Resources From Other Sites
- Free Patterns Around The Web, a compiled list on Sewhooked
Paper Piecing Hints
- Always use 100% cotton, good quality quilting fabric.
- Use lightweight paper when printing, as it tears off easier. I like recycled printer paper. You can also try products like Carol Doak’s Foundation Paper
- Almost all Sewhooked patterns have a 1/4″ seam allowance and will finish 5″ (5 1/2″ unfinished).
- For best printing, set PDF printing to “no scaling”
- A Note to International Visitors – The patterns on Sewhooked are formatted for the standard paper size in the United States. U.S. A4, is 8.5″ x 11″ while the ISO A4 is 210 × 297mm or 8.3″ × 11.7″. You might occasionally find that a pattern designed by a U.S. designer such as myself won’t quite fit on a sheet of paper. There are a couple of options to get around this problem. If your printer format allows it, you may also wish to print the pattern over multiple pages. You can use larger paper, ISO A3, for example. If neither of these is an option for you, use “scale to fit” in your PDF options. Please note that if the pattern size is reduced, you will need to add a small border to the block for it to be the proper finished size.
- To enlarge the patterns, I recommend printing, cutting apart the pattern pieces and enlarging them individually,for a 5″ pattern, 200% is 10″, etc.
- All Sewhooked patterns are mirror images. The image will be correct AFTER you piece it.
- Blue lines on older patterns indicate inside seams.
- To make sure your blocks align perfectly, find adjacent corners of two pattern pieces, push a pin through the exact corners of each to match the two. Pin or hold the pieces in place for sewing.
- Colors used on patterns are just a guide for fabric placement, the selection is up to you. You can always print in gray scale.
- Leave the paper attached to the block until you sew it in it’s final place, whether it be a quilt, purse, etc. That will keep the bias edges from stretching.
- These are multi-part patterns. Accuracy is very important. If you’re new to paper piecing, just take your time and practice, practice, practice!
- Suggested uses… quilts (of course!), handbags, banners, pillows, totes… use your imagination!
(c) respective designers as listed on individual patterns, websites, etc.
21 Comments
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I am Looking for the paper piecing pattern for the New York Beauty……Have been finding everything but it. I know there are free patterns out there, but where? Help
Hi there! While I don’t have any New York Beauty blocks of my own design (the ones you’ve seen here are from a class I teach using an Alex Anderson book), you can find some really great free NYB patterns online.
There are quite a few over at Ulas’ website. There are also several here that are designed by Donna Duquette.
I hope one of these works for you!
Jennifer
i am looking for paperpiecing patterns for baked goods
Are you looking for any baked good in specific? Muffins, cookies, pies, that sort of thing?
Jennifer
How do you store your projects so you can easily pick them up, take them with you and work on them?
I’m a big fan of plastic shoe boxes and zip top bags for in-progress projects. I don’t usually paper piece on the go, but if I’m taking a project to work on somewhere other than home, I bag it up with all it’s parts before heading out.
I’m making a paper pieced Shoemakers Puzzle, but when I got to put the block together the center doesn’t match right. Not sure what I’m doing wrong. Could you please help. Any suggestions would be appriciated.
Whenever I match up the units of a block, I like to use a pin to find each corresponding corner. For a block like Shoemaker’s Puzzle, I’d match from the point in the center.
You can see more images on my paper piecing tutorial page.
Hi Jen, Attended the Tucson Quilters Guild 34th Annual Quilt Show. A HARRY’S BOOKCASE quilt was entered. It was not the complete PROJECT OF DOOM. Your name was on the tag discribing the quilt. The quiter was Karen Porter. Your work is now in Tucson AZ.
That is wonderful to hear! I hope I get to see photos of the quilt at the show.
Jennifer
Do you do requests? I would like something Pittsburgh Steelers and UNC if possible. Lots of us Steeler fans in NC. Thank you so much.
I don’t generally do sports patterns, but some of my designers on Fandom In Stitches do. We have a small, but growing Sports page and you can leave requests right here. Fandom In Stitches has designers from all over the world, so chances are we’ll have someone that will be interested in making what you’re looking for.
Hello – I’m new to blogging – so, hopefully I do and say the right things. I’m attempting to find out if it’s totally OK to download the cosman.nl Quilt Assistant Program to my home computer. I’m fearful to download freebies and just need to know if there’s a way to know if it’s OK. I have plenty of reason to be unsure. I’ve had my whole system crash to the point I had to replace my computer with this one and I just don’t want this to happen again. Can you tell me if the EQ 7 works the same as the Quilt Assistant Program? I absolutely loved using the Quilting Assistant before my computer crashed. I’ve not been back on since. If it’s possibly unsafe – then, I guess I’ll have to save up to buy a program. Are there other great programs out there than can scan a picture or whatever you have and let you design your own foundation piecing pattern, like I was able to do with the Quilt Assistant Program? Any information you can share will be appreciated. If the QA Program is safe – I’d be really happy. Thanks! Sheryl
Hi Sheryl,
While I can’t personally vouche for the download site, I had absolutely no problem with my download or the software itself and I know multiple other people that also use it with no problem whatsoever. If you have anti-virus software, you can check and make sure it’s set to scan your downloads just to make sure.
EQ is much more complex software than Quilt Assistant doing a whole variety of things. EQ is for designing blocks as well as entire quilts, applique and much more and where QA is free, EQ runs about $200 for the software. It was a business investment for me, and I use it all the time, so it was worth it for me. I would very much recommend doing some research to make sure EQ would be right for you.
I sure hope that helps!
I’m in the market for a new all in one printer can anyone recommend one that prints well on thin paper my Epson Artison 835 won’t feed the paper and jams.
Thanks
I am looking for patterns for New York Beauty Quilt blocks. Any suggested sites?
Thank you!
There are quite a few individual free ones floating around out there. My best suggestion is to google “free new york beauty pattern” and see what you come with. This site has quite a few and this is a good basic pattern. Good luck!
Julie, there was a NYB quilt along last year with several patterns progressing in difficulty, here’s the start page – http://www.amylouwhosews.com/2012/02/new-york-beauty-quilt-along.html
Hi Jennifer,
I’ve been using Quilt Assistant for a few months now, and while it gets the job done, I’m getting frustrated that I can’t change the output font or place the patterns on the print layout. This makes the cleanup process SO LONG, because I’ve got to redo all the text and re-place the pieces within a document. I have been thinking about getting EQ7 but I was wondering if you could tell me if you can do these things when outputting a PP pattern from EQ7: use any font, (I already found you can move the pattern pieces around in the print layout), and when it needs to cut up a pattern to fit multiple pages does it do it any better than Quilt Assistant? Thanks!!!
You can do these things in EQ. When prepping to print, you can print with or without numbering and you can change the font. You can also move around or delete pieces so they are placed where you want them. Sometimes I use both softwares and export files from QA to EQ to complete. I don’t like the way either software numbers, etc., print patterns without numbering from EQ to a PDF and then number them myself in Photoshop. It’s a little tedious, but then the patterns look exactly the way I want. Hope that helps!
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