Foundation Paper Piecing Series 4 - April

Published March 2026

Join Jen as she shares how to make the Foundation Paper Piecing 4 design for April! This project captures the beauty of spring with a beautiful butterfly in sweet florals and lovely batiks. Each wall hanging finishes at approximately 12" x 12", just right for adding a handmade touch to a little nook or small space in your home.

In this video, you'll learn:

• How Shabby Fabrics' printed foundation papers and matching stickers differ from generic foundation paper piecing patterns, which leave you to print and label everything yourself.
• The “back of the paper, back of the fabric” rule for gluing your very first piece, and why that distinction matters more with screen-printed cotton than with batik.
• How the Add-A-Quarter ruler set adds a seam allowance for you with no measuring, using its tapered edge for folding and its lip for trimming.
• Why those small jogs and notches along a section's cutting line are engineered on purpose, and what goes wrong if you square them off with a straight cut instead.
• A pin-at-the-start-and-end-only habit — never in the seam itself — that noticeably improves piecing accuracy.

Check the links for everything you need.

Introduction

This is the opening project of Foundation Paper Piecing Series 4: a butterfly, pieced from a deliberate mix of screen-printed cotton and batik fabrics and finished with a gingham binding. Because this is the very first installment of the series, it's built to cover every facet of the technique for total beginners — if you've never tried foundation paper piecing before, this is the place to start.

Foundation paper is not the same as regular printer paper. A common alternative many patterns rely on is Carol Doak Foundation Paper, which requires printing your own copies at home. Every foundation paper piecing kit from Shabby Fabrics includes the foundation papers already printed for you, along with a matching set of stickers — a real head start before you've made a single cut.

Cutting and the Sticker System

Every foundation paper piecing pattern is broken into lettered sections — A, B, C, and so on — each built up one small numbered piece at a time.

1. Cut each fabric piece to the size your pattern calls for, then apply its matching sticker immediately.
2. Notice that your stickers aren't numbered straight through in one long sequence — they're numbered in the order you'll actually be cutting and piecing, which jumps between sections as you go.
3. Each lettered section corresponds to one distinct area of the design — here, a section might be a portion of one wing — and every section is built using exactly the same process, whether a design has five sections or thirty.
4. Add sizing to your fabric before you start, and put a fresh blade in your rotary cutter — accuracy in foundation paper piecing starts with a clean cut.

Back of the Paper, Back of the Fabric

The very first piece in each section gets glued into place rather than pinned, and getting its orientation right matters.

1. Remember the rule: back of the fabric against the back of the paper. With screen-printed cotton, the right and wrong sides are obvious; with batik, there usually isn't a clear front or back at all, so think through the placement as if it were cotton anyway.
2. Run a line of glue — never a liquid glue, always a glue pen — along the back of your fabric, then position it so it covers the full footprint of that piece plus a quarter inch of margin on every side.
3. Hold your piece up to a light source, such as a light pad, to confirm you've got that quarter-inch margin all the way around before moving on — it's much easier to fix now than after the next piece is sewn on top of it.

Trim, Sew, Press: The TSP Rhythm

From your first piece onward, every remaining piece in a section follows the same three-step rhythm — trim, sew, press, or “TSP” for short — carried by the Add-A-Quarter ruler set.

1. Set the ruler's tapered edge just to the left of your next sewing line, fold the paper over it for a clean, crisp fold directly on the line, then rotate the ruler around to lock its lip against that fold.
2. Trim away the excess paper and fabric along the ruler's edge.
3. Position your next piece right sides together, checking with a light source that you've got full quarter-inch coverage, then sew directly on the line — starting a touch before the line and stopping a touch after it is just as good as starting and stopping exactly on it.
4. Press the seam open before moving on to the next piece in the section.

Shorten your stitch length and switch needles for any seam sewn through paper. Bring your stitch length down from a typical 2.5mm to 1.5mm, and sew with a size 70/10 Microtex Sharp needle — finer than the 80/12 typically used for regular patchwork. The shorter stitch length perforates the paper heavily, which keeps everything stable once you start tearing the paper away, and you'll never actually see that thread once the paper is removed.

Why Those Tiny Jogs Aren't Mistakes

Look closely at a section's cutting line and you'll notice small jogs and notches that can look, at first glance, like a drawing error.

1. Those little jogs are engineered into the pattern on purpose — they're what lets two sections line up in perfect alignment once they're sewn together.
2. Cut along them exactly rather than squaring them off with one straight ruler line from corner to corner — skipping a jog to save a step is what throws off the alignment it was there to