English Paper Piecing Quilt-Along!

Now before you get all excited, quilt-along, in this case, means that its going to take A-LONG time to make the quilt.  Get it? Or is that just really bad quilter humour? : )

Ahem, moving on.  I've been wanting to try English Paper Piecing(EPP) for a while now and I've managed to convince Katie, my Sister and Faye(my Mother- in-Law) to play too. Faye is going to do her favourite shape, the hexagon, in a 1 1/4" Size(the length of one side), my Sister is also doing hexagons but the 1/2" size, while Katie will be using 1/2" shapes but I'm not sure yet which ones. 

I'm going to use the 60 degree diamonds in the 1" size.  That's small enough for me! I've chosen some solid fabric to give it a more modern feel.

Fabric for English Paper Piecing

The colours in this photo above(at least on my laptop) are very close to the real colours, in the other ones below, not so much. So feel free to scroll back up to compare. 

You'll notice I've now added a light green to the selection, and now I'm not sure I need the purple but I'm just going to see how it goes. (See how relaxed I am Katie!)

Diamond Peeper, 60 degree Diamond Paper Pieces

For my paper pieces, I chose a 190gsm card, so that its fairly stiff and I can tack the fabric around it, rather than tacking through the paper and then having to unpick all those stitches later. Later I'll have a look at some places I've bookmarked that use this method and I'll share them with you.

 

I also purchased a 1" diamond peeper(that's the pink thing) which you can use for fussy cutting your fabric.  I am using solids for this project  so I didn't really need it but it was really handy to use when cutting my strips to size.

I'm also using my hole punch to punch holes in all the little pieces.  That's so once a shape is surrounded by pieces sewn to it, I can just pop it out and then re-use it.

60 degree Diamonds

I've now cut all my fabric.  Look at all those little stacks, aren't they cute! they just say play with me...

60 Degree Diamond Layout

So I did.  One day I might actually sew some.