Paper Quilting

Have you ever done any quilting?  My earliest memory was doing what I now know is English Paper Piecing when I was a child, using paper hexagons, folding and tacking fabric over them and then hand stitching them together to make a cushion cover.  Over the past few years, I’ve made a few quilts as gifts using half-square triangles (HST) to create the pattern and there are lots of patterns to chose from.  Here is one of the pinwheel quilts I made.

I have quite a collection of patterned paper, that I tend not to use very often, and it occurred to me that I could make quilt cards with it.  For the first couple of cards, I cut 1½” squares of paper and white card and then cut the paper in half diagonally to make HST.

Each triangle was glued to a square and then the squares glued onto a piece of paper.  I used an invoice from my paper scrap bin as it wouldn’t be visible, it is purely a carrier.

The next stage is to dry emboss the panel to give it the look of quilting.  I used the Flourishing Fauna by Sentimentally Yours as it was the only suitable one that I have that was wide enough.  I finished this card by adding some die-cut buttons and a needle with gold embroidery thread, plus the sentiment.

For this card, I finished it with a zig-zag stitch done on my sewing machine.  I really like the texture that this adds. 

For this pinwheel card, I cut the 1½” paper squares into 8.  Yes 8 pieces!  It was very fiddly but I love the finished smaller pinwheels.

The next two cards also use HST but use a pattern called Flying Geese.  I cut four pieces of white card 3” x 1½” and marked a pencil line down the centre.  The HST were glued in place, using the gridlines to line up the outside triangle points and the centreline for the top point.

I added another square into the centre for the sentiment, popped up on foam tape.

The last card is also a Flying Geese variation, this time using nine 1½” squares and two HST papers.  These were then rotated around to create the pattern.

I really enjoyed making these cards.  They were a little fiddly to cut but the assembly was quite relaxing and I love the finished results.