Template Piecing

Template piecing is a fabric cutting technique that uses either paper templates or plastic templates for cutting the pieces needed for your quilt project. Using templates for me was at first baffling, then frustrating and now I appreciate the accuracy and ease of making quilts with pieces other than the basic square, rectangle and 45° triangles.

Mississippi Star

The Mississippi Star block is a beautiful, but challenging block. Many years ago I attempted my first template pieced block with little to no instruction on how to do so. I tried to figure out how to make the template pieces fit strips cut at the ¼ inch and many more mistakes.

Double Stars

Double Star #2

Double Star #1

In quilting sometimes blocks have more than 1 name and sometimes more than 1 block has the same name. I was able to find 5 different Double Star quilt blocks. There are likely more out there that are a little harder to find.

Things I learned about quilting

Quilters are probably always learning of new ways to do things, at least new to them and here are some things I've learned that have helped me tons...


Sandwiching and quilting: A guest on Alex Anderson's Simply Quilts (whose name escapes me now) showed how to sandwich a quilt smoothing the seams, borders and blocks square, pushing excess to middle. The quilting will take up the slack and your quilt will be square, and hang better.