Week 2 – Blocks 1, 2 and 3

It’s time to start sewing! Oooh I love this part of quilt making. After preparing all the materials, patting and selecting your fabrics, it’s finally time to get behind your sewing machine.

This week we will sew the first three blocks in our quilt along.

You can go for the top 3 first, or bottom 3 first. Or do 3 with the wings down, or 3 with alterations to the wings. It’s all up to you which one to start with.

When you do the 12 penguin quilt, go ahead and make 4 penguins to be able to finish the quilt top in the next weeks as well.

Freezer paper

Last week was preparation week. Did you get your fabrics ready? And have you prepared your pattern yet?

I love using the Freezer Paper method for Foundation Paper Piecing whenever I need to sew multiple blocks of the same kind.

Here’s a video of the foundation paper piecing technique on freezer paper.

Tutorial on how to do foundation paper piecing with freezer paper

If you’re using the freezer paper method you can prepare two penguin patterns on freezer paper. One with it’s nose pointing to the left, and one pointing to the right.

You can reuse freezer paper, so two pattern pieces of each section should be enough to make nine penguins.

And then you’re all set to start sewing!

Sashing first

Just a quick reminder if you are going to start cutting in to your fabrics now. It’s nice to cut your sashing first from the background fabric. Then you can use all the fabric that’s left over for the blocks.

Let’s sew some blocks!

Time to start sewing to make our first three penguin blocks.

As you can probably tell from last weeks post, I love to batch while sewing. So what I like to do is first sew all the sections of the three blocks. Finish all the wings, the feet, the bellies. Then trim them. And then sew them all together.

I can imagine this batching sounds a little boring. So, as always, feel free to do you! There is a very fun aspect in seeing the penguins come to life one by one in stead of sewing a ton of feet first :)