Simplifying a Paper Piecing Design
My friend, Susan Mast, sent me an image she was tracing to create the card above. She was stuck on the raccoon’s tail. She had it designed so that there were 5 individual pieces, but what she wanted was just two pieces… a solid gray piece and then a black overlay piece with sections cut out. This makes a lot of sense, especially when designs have many smaller interior paths that would require an insane amount of arranging and gluing.
So, as usual, a picture is worth a thousand words and a video is worth ten thousand! lol So, here’s the video to show you how I took Susan’s tracing of the tail and then turned it into the paper piecing she wanted. Note that this example is a little more complicated than most because we needed to do what I call a die cut weld, in order to get the individual pieces first. Thus, in many situations, you would be starting with just an image with lots of little parts and then creating the cut-out overlay and the slightly shrunken background piece.
A big thanks to Susan for allowing me to use her question for today’s post! If you happen to live in Arizona, note that Susan teaches card and mini-album classes at Scrapbooks, Etc in Mesa. Her classes are always so much fun with adorable projects to make! You can also visit her web site and blog to see more of her adorable work.
