Paper piecing with freezer paper

I don’t do a lot of piecing, but I don’t have a top that has to be quilted right away, so I decided to try some triangle piecing. I usually stick to squares and rectangles because I like the dependable way they go together, and I love to twirl those seam allowances on the back. I’ve been playing around with Star Struck from http://www.quiltville.com. For this block you sew together two 2-1/2 inch x 4-1/2 inch rectangles to make one 4-1/2 inch square. Then you sew off a light 2-1/2 inch square on the dark corner and a dark 2-1/2 inch square on the light corner. Four of these units makes a block with a light friendship star in the middle.

 Sewing diagonally across the corner square to make a triangle is supposed to be one of the best known shortcuts in the quilting world. However, it just doesn’t work for me. They always go wonky and are not square in the end. So I tried some other things. I got out my Easy Angle tool so I could cut them into the right sized triangles first and then sewed them on. That was no better.

Then I decided I needed a larger triangle on the corner. So I marked it carefully, stitched across, and trimmed to size; I still wasn’t pleased. Finally, the idea of paper piecing hit me. I came up with a modified version of paper piecing that worked. I used freezer paper printed from EQ6 (http://www.electricquilt.com) and carefully pressed the fabric to the freezer paper, then folded back each section and stitched along the edge of the paper rather than stitching through the paper. It worked much better.

Freezer PP

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