Looking for a fun project for Valentine’s day or really for anytime of the year? Why not add a fun quilting block to one of your PSCo patterns?! Yep, you heard me right! I added a paper pieced heart block to a Spenser tee and I absolutely love how it turned out!
If you still need a copy of the Spenser Tee, you can grab it HERE. It's available in baby, kids and adult sizes.
I’m going to do a quick walk through of how I adapted it to work for my project. If you need a more in depth instruction for paper piecing, there are some great videos on YouTube!
I chose to do a heart for my daughter’s Valentine’s top but you could really use any design you would like. There are a bunch of free quilting blocks online but this is the one I specifically used HERE. I knew I wanted to use the color-block Spenser tee so I ended up scaling the heart to the size that would fit perfectly in the top color-block piece.
Next, I knew that I wanted to change the outer corners to work with the pattern so that I wouldn’t have to cut out a square to insert it at the end. I overlaid my Spenser pattern piece with the print out of the heart and figured out which lines would be best to extend so it all worked as one piece. I found it easier to do this by putting all the papers up on a window then tracing a new piece onto some drawing paper.
Once I had my new piece all ready to go then I had to decide on fabrics! This is a great scrap buster so definitely dive into those scrap bins! I decided to go with all solids for mine, after changing my mind a few times. Ha-ha. I used cotton spandex French Terry for all of my fabrics. If your fabric doesn’t have good structure or is super stretchy then you may have to add some lightweight interfacing to the back of your pieces.
Now to start placing the fabrics and sewing!
I placed my first piece (A1) on the wrong side of the paper, right sides up. Double checking that my scrap piece was going to cover the whole section. I measured ¼” over into the A2 square and placed the A1 fabric along that edge. I found using a washable glue stick in the seam allowance was great for holding everything in place.
Then I placed the A2 piece right sides together with the A1 piece, lining up along that first ¼” piece that I measured over and glued.
Holding those pieces in place, I flipped the paper over so I could see the lines and sewed right along the line marked on the paper using a shortened straight stitch (1.5-1.6).
I then flipped the paper back to wrong sides, folded the piece of fabric over into its spot and gave it a press. Then folded the paper along the outer lines of the piece I just did. Measured leaving a ¼” seam allowance then trimmed the rest. I continued doing this for all of the pieces.
When I got to the outer corner pieces I used the outer lines of the pattern piece to trim the edges.
Once I had all the squares done, then I removed the paper from the back.
I added some fusible fleece to the back of the heart area then added a thin piece of fabric over it as well since my daughter has some sensitive skin. I then finished it off with some fun topstitching!
I finished putting the shirt together per the tutorial instructions and all done!
