I built a house today

Dear folks,

You guys know how I love to use house motif in my bags and stuff. Well, I'm sick of doing the usual backstitch house embroidery. So I decided to build a house using paper piecing.

Never heard of paper piecing? It's a technique used in quilting and scrapbooking to piece accurately a design using a template printed on a piece of paper. The template is numbered starting from 1. The numbers indicate the order in which the pieces are sewn. And yes, you sew onto the paper which you will tear away when you are ready to discard it. 

I had the idea that I would use my scraps to build this house. But if you've done paper piecing before, you'll know you can't just take a bunch of scraps and piece them randomly together and hope everything will turn out all right. It doesn't work that way.

Paper piecing is a very deliberate craft. You have to think about how you want your piecing to turn out, look for the fabric and put everything together. But I did managed to use 2 of my scraps. The blue background is a Michael Miller remnant that had been lying around for ages. The door is from a Junichi Nakahara print remnant.

So here you can see how I don't have enough of the blue fabric.....

If you're keen to try paper piecing yourself, here's a tute to start you off.  And this blog has many easy patterns.

A house has to have love, right? This one  is filled with hearts.

And this old pouch was one of my early attempts at paper piecing. Possibly done in 2007.

12 out of 74 projects completed.