This is officially my first ever quilting project. And my first ever paper piecing project. I guess you could say my motto is go big or go home?

I’ve been wanting to quilt for a long time now and figured it might be good to start with some smaller projects. I’m in a mini quilt secret partner swap and needed something to get me ramped up for that.

I recently purchased this book after hearing everyone raving about it on their blogs and on instagram. I couldn’t resist the idea of one-day projects and using up some of my fabric scraps. Everything that I used to make this trivet came from my scrap bag (and of course, barely made a dent!).

While the book is very comprehensive, it notes right from the beginning that if you are a visual learner – that would be me – one might be best to google around for a few paper piecing tutorials.

I found this one from the website Connecting Threads and it was absolutely perfect.

After a few false starts (aka: becoming very acquainted with my seam ripper), I was well on my way!

It was so excited to see the project come together right before my eyes! I can see why paper piecing is so addictive.

My Janome Juno M1250Q was perfect for this job for so many different reasons. Not only was is easy to get set up and get the stitch length just so (paper piecing requires a very short stitch length) but the ability to slow down how fast the machine could go was immensely helpful so that I wasn’t able to get ahead of myself (especially when it got to the quilting part since I was dealing with very small seam allowances).

I also found a great how-to on the double-binding method. I used this one here from the blog Vanilla Joy. The only difference was my binding required a much smaller seam, but that was because I ended up using a smaller width of fabric (because I was trying to use up my scraps).

I stitched the binding on the backside with a blind-stitch to finish it off nicely.

I see a few more of these in my future!!

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