Summer Sampler 2018: Southwest Highway Block

Are you all ready for Block 3 of the Summer Sampler 2018 quilt-along? This week we’re making “Southwest Highway” by Katie Pedersen of Sew Katie Did. Can I pick a favorite block after only three weeks at it? Because I LOVE this block! The simple paper-pieced triangles inspired by the mountains of New Mexico are just so graphic and fun.

Summer Sampler 2018: Summer Road Trip is a quilt-along where all the blocks are travel-inspired. We’re making one block per week, starting now and going through September. You can still join us—click here to subscribe! 

So let’s add our third star to our world-travel map! This one goes right here in the U.S. of A.

Every Monday I’m blogging tips and tricks for making that week’s block, so this week I thought I would talk about paper-piecing and positioning.

First, for those of you who have never paper-pieced before: It’s an amazing way to make highly accurate pieced blocks, in designs that you really can’t achieve with any other method—once you get your head around it, anyway! As long as you can sew on the line, you can make incredibly accurate and interesting blocks. I love paper-piecing and always hope to make a few new believers every time I share a paper-pieced project, so give it a chance! And one of my favorite things about this block is that there are no seams to line up after making the paper-pieced sections, so it’s a very beginner-friendly block in that respect. Paper-piecing newbies can check out Faith’s beginner paper-piecing tutorial right here.

For the more experienced paper-piecers out there, you might be wondering how I made my prints appear (relatively) straight in the finished block, since that’s not something paper-piecing usually lends itself to. I accomplished that by cutting the fabric into a very oversized version of the shape you end up with after it’s sewn. So in this case, I used the angled side of one of this block’s paper-piecing templates to trim the fabric at the correct angle on one edge, as shown here …

… and then flipped the template over and did the same thing on the other side of the fabric piece, again to get the correct angle.

These angles are what will allow that fabric piece to flip back and be nice and straight. This is challenging, and some of my pieces are still a bit off, but I’m still in love with how the block turned out!

I think that’s it for this week! If you want to join us for Summer Sampler 2018, click here to subscribe. If you’re already quilting along with us, be sure to hashtag #summersampler2018 to show us your progress! Have a great week!