And there is more than one way to do trapunto quilting.   In the hand-quilting method you hand-sew a piece of cloth (generally muslin) onto the back of the quilt face, following the pattern of the trapunto quilting you wish to achieve, leaving a small opening. You then stuff cotton or wool quilt batting (the kind that is in comforters or stuffed animals) into the opening and sew up the opening. For particularly small or detailed patterns yarn is sometimes used for the stuffing.

I chose to use the machine method since I thought the paper would hold up better to this method and frankly I wasn’t sure I had the patience for the hand sewing method. Here is how the machine method looks when done with paper.

Step 1: I cut out a small piece of cotton quilt batting that was slightly larger than the interior circle on the square I wanted to start the quilting with. I lined it up on the back side of the square over the circle, flipped the two pieces over and, following the outline of the circle, sewed the two pieces together. (Lesson 1 from this – It’s not as easy as I thought it would be to read the circles as I stitch – going forward need to double check each square and outline them if necessary before starting to sew!)

Step 2: I trimmed off the excess batting, being careful not to cut into the paper or the stitching. This is identical to how you would do this if you were doing it with fabric.

Step 3: I cut another piece of batting slightly larger than one of the half circles and repeated the process. Overlapping/doubling up the batting is optional. Given the nature of the pattern I was using I chose to overlap.

Step 4: I trimmed off the excess batting and went in and sewed back over the overlapping part of the underlying circle. From this point on it’s more of the same – wash, rinse, repeat with each of the remaining half circles.

Step 5: Then the actual quilting starts. I drew the additional quilting lines on the front of the square beforehand following a stencil to make them consistent. Here is how it looks from the back. (The funky part on the right is what you get when you spend too much attention to following a line and don’t notice that your footer is gummed up with wax and your bobbin gets all bunched up by the way…)

And this is how the completed square looks from the front: