Paper Piecing the Single Girl Quilt

I really, really love the Single Girl quilt pattern by Denyse Schmidt....but oh my word, all those pieces are mind numbing.  I was brave enough to buy the pattern and give it a try last summer, but things did not go well, at all.  My seam allowance was horrible, nothing fit right at all.  I was so bummed!!

So I got it in my head that SURELY I could paper piece this pattern!  And let me tell you....this is the way to go!  I didn't want to rip my hair out at any point while putting it together, and I actually think it takes less time to assemble.

I created my paper piecing pattern using a pencil and tracing paper.  I have a roll of tracing paper I got from the teacher supply store a while ago...and it's awesome for paper piecing.

 You need to keep the solid lines a the beginning and ends of each right, and at the tops and bottoms.  Trace around the solid lines and then the dotted lines.  Line up the dotted lines with the next piece in the ring.  Here I have the second ring, I lining up with J, then J lining up with K.

 At the end of the ring, finish tracing with the solid line at the end.

 Here is ring 2, ready for the paper piecing step!  The only issue I have with this method is that the rings are just a little too big to be able to copy on photocopier...so that means you have to create a template for each ring.  But that's still more accurate than cutting all those pieces by hand!

 If you've never paper pieced before, there are some great tutorials online...one of them here.

 Once all 4 rings are finished and pressed, trim and remove the paper.  You need to remove the paper before attaching to the background fabric.  I just followed the directions in the pattern for putting these blocks together.

 I used pins to remember which number each ring was.

 Here they are!!  Rings 1-4.  You can see the number pins in the middle reminding me what rings were which.

Now for the finished product!!  I can't believe how easy this ended up being compared to cutting each piece out one by one~can you tell that I HATE doing that!!  I can't wait to make an entire quilt using this method.  I didn't have to do any trimming up at the end, either...everything just matched up perfectly!  I hope this helps anyone else who feels the same way I do about the Single Girl!

Linking up at Skip to My Lou--Made by You Mondays!