Friday 15 August 2014

A first attempt at English Paper Piecing

Gosh I can't believe that it was nearly a month since I wrote my last blog post.  It is amazing how time zooms past sometimes!

I mentioned in my last post that we were about to have visitors.  What I didn't mention was that the visitor was my Dad and that he was here to do up my bathroom. Needless to say the house was upside down and normality was well and truly disrupted.  While I didn't have much time (or space) for doing any crafty things I had just received the first edition of Quilt Now Magazine and completely fell in love with the that Apple Sorbet quilt by Fiona Calvert from Poppy Makes.

However,  I have never done any EPP before and thought it may be a bit ambitious for a first go. Fortunately the mag also had a quick tutorial on EPP at the back using Hexagons which I thought may be a better first project. Especially since my blog browsing over the last few years seems indicate that this is a go to craft for travelling. Perfect!

Thankfully this idea came to me the night before my Dad arrived so I was able to pop out to my local fabric store on my lunchbreak and pick up this Bartholo-meow's Reef mini charm pack by Moda.  I had seen these pre-cuts a while back and thought they were very cute so this project was the perfect excuse to buy them!

It was then home to print my 1" hexagons and get basting!

It didn't take long before I had a pile of based hexagons.


I tried a few layouts before I settled on this one.
 

Then it was onto joining those hexis together, and my low tech method of keeping track what seams I was supposed to be sewing!


Which did not always go to plan - oops! Just as well the seam ripper was handy.

I also did my best to try and keep the stitches small and neat

I then realised that I didn't like the layout of the small red dotty hexagon in the top row so it was back out with the seam ripper to change the layout.  This is what I ended up with and how the blocks were being  joined together.

Finished!


Then it was onto removing the paper pieces.  I used my seam ripper for this job as it helped the papers pop out of place.

I decided that I wanted to make this into a mini wall hanging and I found this fab tutorial by Cintia from My Poppet for a hexagon table runner which kept the nice zig zag shape at the edges.

I would recommend checking out her blog for exactly how to do it but here is how well I pinned my quilt sandwich before I started sewing round the edges. I don't normally pin that heavily but this project called for it!

I then cut a slit in the back pulled through the fabric and finished off the back with this small bit of ribbon

How cute is this!  Not bad for my first EPP project and I would definitely do this again.  Don't think I would manage to make a whole quilt using the 1" hexagons but I do think I would manage that Apple Sorbet quilt. :)  


3 comments:

  1. Aww very cute - love the fabric!!

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  2. wow i really love this quilt! i really need to give this a try :-)

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