I began English Paper Piecing a very long time ago and loved it but, as time went by and I had children and got caught up in writing stories and poems, somehow I forgot about it.

The first quilt I made. (Tumbling Blocks)

A year or so ago I signed up to Pinterest and memories of the almost Zen-like enjoyment of hand stitching came flooding back. I needed to begin again. I needed to finish the things I had begun years ago and packed away in the attic. And I needed to try some new ideas I was curious about.  (You can find me on Pinterest, at the following address, if you want to visit: https://uk.pinterest.com/tartansanta/.)

English Paper Piecing seems popular in America right now, but there it seems to be mainly about the Hexagon and finding ways of avoiding paper templates and too much hand stitching. While I like to see a variety of ways of approaching a single idea, so we can choose what suits our lifestyles and methods we like best, I was dismayed by how little information I could find on other shapes in English Paper Piecing. What about triangles?  Where are the triangles!

Of course I did find some eventually but they didn’t tell me enough. I wanted to know more about how to manage each individual shape; what they could add to a pattern;  to try different methods and see where one might work better than another; what could go wrong and how to fix it.

So, I am on a mission to discover what I can do with with English Paper Piecing and what MORE I can do. It is so much more than the humble hexagon but how much more? I want to find out.

This blog is about me heading off on this journey and inviting you to join me, to rediscover the tradition that is EPP and its possibilities. I want to revisit traditional shapes and newer ones; to look at what is happening with EPP around the world, investigate innovations in EPP like mylar templates; compare ways of stitching, embellishing  and finishing. Most of all I want to find out what else I can do with EPP. Can I make a crazy quilt? ? Can I make people and animals? Is applique another form of EPP.  I want to find out.

Alley Cat – 1 inch squares and ridiculously tiny triangles. What a headache this was!

I hope some of you will join me, not just for support but so I can hear about your experiences, your successes and failures, and the ways in which you got around your difficulties. If you have some helpful experience I’d love to hear from you and I expect others will too.

I need to spend some time updating my pages and after that I am likely to post whenever I begin a new project, perhaps twice a month at first. Anything more would be a little too ambitious for now…

Here we go then….. Follow Lesley Jackson's board'Quilts – English Paper Piecing (EPP) Blocks/Designs/Ideas



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