Taking Stock at this Stage of the Journey

September 4, 2021September 4, 2021 / lesleyjjackson / 6 Comments

*Two little boys playing footsie in the grass*.

Hi Everyone,

I have been doing a lot of thinking this past month; of the where am I, where am I going and why, variety. I’ve been looking at what I have done, what went well and not so well and wishing there was more time in any day for what I want to do. I’ll come back to this in a moment, but first, a little of what I have be doing since my last post.

I have finished ‘All Roads Lead Home’, quilting it and adding what I call a ‘proper’ binding:

‘All Roads Lead Home’ (with geese to fend off intruders!)

I have decided to add bindings like this to all quilts of this size and larger, from now on. I used to just fold the backing fabric to the front because it was cheaper and easier, and it works fine on 8 inch quilts or smaller that go on the wall and don’t get a lot of wear. However, adding your own separate binding gives a more professional look and wears better on larger quilts such as table toppers, runners and bed quilts that are going to handled and washed more often.

I added embroidered details onto a couple of mini quilts that seemed to lack something. Both took HOURS to do and I am not sure I like them any better. Both need binding, so perhaps that will improve how they look.

The first is ‘Daffodils in the Garden’ which I had hoped to complete before the end of Spring:

The stem stitch on each of the trees does give them more texture. I love how they feel to the touch but they took HOURS to stitch, so I won’t be doing that again, anytime soon. It might be nice for a more special quilt though. Embroidery does tend to pucker the fabric, so I usually dampen and stretch it a little. The binding will straighten up the squiggly edges.

The second one is ‘A Home in the Hills’:

The embroidery on this took ages, too, and though I am happy enough with some of it, the house and the tree behind the house in the centre square, are not straight, and this makes the rest of the quilt look wonky. I could have removed the whole centre square and rotated it a little at an earlier stage but this is not really possible once it is quilted. This is why you need to keep standing away from your work and looking at it from a distance. When you are hunched over it, with your focus on the tiny bit you are stitching, you can lose sight of the whole picture until it is too late to change it.

I have a whole pile waiting to be quilted. I like quilting. It’s quick and easy once you have decided how you are going to do it. I don’t mind adding binding either. There is something very satisfying about seeing your quilt slowly reach completion, with this last step in the process. I notice that there is not a single Pinterest ‘how to’ on sewing both sides of the binding on by hand. It seems that everyone resorts to a machine at this point.

The weather is sunny and warm but I have been avoiding the garden because I came out one morning to water the plants that I have been nurturing all year, to find the deer have been feasting on them, biting the heads off flowers, and chewing the leaves and stems off shrubs,. Some are now no more than a couple of blunt stalks.It’s heartbreaking. The deer visit from time to time but it’s never been this bad.

But they did miss this one, thank goodness. Too close to the front door for their liking, maybe:

Each year I look at all my boxes of fabric and quilts done and in progress, and all the ones unfinished for one reason or another. I usually decide I don’t like any of the ones I have done, haven’t finished any of what I planned to do and haven’t got any closer to what I have wanted to do. So what is the solution? A change of plan to start with, I think.

*The bookcase where I keep my stash and quilts waiting to be quilted*.

When I started out I wanted to make children’s quilts. I no longer want to do this but I have collections of fabric that I bought, for specific patternsTh that are still waiting to be made. I still like the patterns and the fabrics but somehow they belong to a different me. I also have fabrics for two quilts of single bed size and fabrics for several traditional patterns I wanted to try at the time, like Courthouse Steps and a Log Cabin. I also wanted to make a quilt using a Jelly Roll and to try some ‘liberated’ quilting where there was no set pattern. At that time everything was new and I wanted to try a bit of everything that I saw. Designing something for myself never occurred to me.

I love American quilt blocks and their evocative names, and at some point I realised that I could either manipulate the shapes in a single block to create a different design of my own, or I could add something pictorial to a block to give it a more personal meaning. I could add birds to ‘Return of the Swallows’, a farmhouse to ‘Farm Friendliness’ and so on. And I could make them about Scotland because we have farms and swallows, too. I made mostly 8″ size mini quilts because that was the largest pattern that my printer could cope with, and I cut out the paper shapes to wrap them with fabric because I couldn’t afford to buy the paper pieces (and there weren’t as many available a decade ago).

My brain is always ahead of my hands so it wasn’t long before I had a situation where I wanted to move on, and do something completely different, but was stuck with all my quilts-in-progress and there were so many to do before I could get there. Does this happen to you, too?

Eventually I found myself juggling four separate strands of quilt making – the early quilts that I never completed, dozens of Scottish mini quilts in progress, the new ideas I want to try with English Paper Piecing and the constant pull further closer to textile art where I could take the time to design things of my own. I feel there is so much more to discover about English Paper Piecing and where it might fit into textile art rather than quilting. There are so many ideas I can’t get even begin to get close to right now.

I called this blog ‘A English Paper Piecing Journey’ because I think I realised, even then, that my experiments with one thing or another would eventually lead me far from where I began.

So, I have made some decisions:

I do not want to sell or give away those early quilt fabric and patterns, so the only solution is to get them done and the sooner the better. So, I am going to make a start, right now. There are about 17 of them, so I won’t be done with them this year.

I do not want to make 8″ mini quilts anymore, but want to make some slightly larger ones for the wall. These might be between 36 and 48 inches square, so not huge, but bigger. Having said that there are about fifteen Scottish mini quilts still in progress but I am going to put these aside for a while.

When you are making tiny quilts it is entirely possible to have something different to share in each blog post. Making larger ones could mean lots of posts about progress on the same quilt. Although I plan to work on a couple of them at the same time, I don’t want my posts to be like watching paint dry. So, I have decided to intersperse the making of these with some ‘how to’ posts that you might find useful. I want to start with colouring English Paper Piecing; how to add paint, coloured pencils, markers and crayons to your work. And then, if time allows, I want to experiment with using English Paper Piecing in non-traditional ways, such as using tulle to trap objects and so on.

Having made my decision, I spent much of August going through each box of fabric, sketching out the pattern, deciding on the size I want to make it and the paper pieces I would need. I am now buying the paper pieces and cutting out the shapes. The idea is that every box will contain everything needed to complete each quilt (no more procrastination because I don’t have all the paper pieces, or I haven’t decided on the right pattern, or size). It should now be possible for me to take any box I fancy off the shelf, and begin.

*A ‘Neighbourhood’ quilt waiting to be made with Moda Neco*

I always buy my paper pieces from https://www.linapatchwork.com because she has such a great range of simple shapes that allow you to reproduce any block pattern in any size you like, or design your own. Of course she also stocks the shapes for the hugely popular Passacaglia and other such patterns and kits, as well, but I have never been interested in those. She will also custom make paper pieces for your own design if you ask. I really want to ask her to make me the ‘Storm at Sea’ pattern in EPP one day. Have you seen it. It’s made up of straight lines that look like curves.

*Some Paper Pieces that arrived this morning. She always includes a few complementary shapes to try, too*.

HOT TIP: I have discovered that when you want a size that is not generally available, you can join paper pieces together to make the size you need. For example, you can join four 4″ squares to make an 8″ square centre, or join to 4 x 1″ rectangles for the 8×1″ outer log for your log cabin. If you stick them together with a strip of Sellotape at the join you can cut them apart again later and re-use them, though it’s possible that if you joined them with washi tape, you could just peel the tape off afterwards. I’ll try that and let you know if it works.

Despite all the laudable decision making, planning and organising there is always the problem of how overwhelming the sheer volume of what there is to do, can become. Why do we do this to ourselves? Maybe we think we have more time than we have, or can work faster than we do. I think it’s often about seeing fabric we love and want to use, and we think if we don’t get it now, it will be gone forever. Why can we not see that, like ideas or creativity, there will always be always be more. Maybe this is me. Maybe you are a great deal more sensible.

Till next time……

*Macz (short for MacKenzie) taking some time out in the cat kennel*

Little Steps with Mini Quilts

June 30, 2021July 1, 2021 / lesleyjjackson / 2 Comments

Hi Everyone,

*My beautiful blue poppy, a gift from a friend several years ago*

I’m sorry that I seem to have been away so long. It was my plan to have the whole of May to garden but May turned out to be wet windy and cold. I think I managed about three days in all and made very little progress. Then, as it turned to June, the days suddenly became hot and buggy and the garden exploded into huge patches of nettles. I feel rather disheartened as I made nothing like the progress I usually do. I will try again towards the end of the year when the swallows have gone, the weeds begin to die down a bit and the weather is more pleasant to work in.

I have planted around my duck area to make it look pretty and feel more secure but they do tend to trample over everything, so I don’t plant anything precious there.

The cows have become very interested in my ducks lately and spend hours staring at them over the wall. The ducks pretend they haven’t seen them.

The pots in my courtyard are looking good but it takes all morning to water them. I usually keep things in pots until they are fairly large before they are planted or the deer eat them.

What has been really successful is all the cuttings I took of Hydrangeas last year. All of them have survived and are just beginning to flower. I will keep some and give some away to friends.

In the hours that the garden was inhospitable I did quite a bit of spring cleaning and sold some stuff on EBay that I had been wanting to get rid of for a while. And I came across a new and interesting product available for English Paper Piecing that I hope to try out and review, as soon as I can. It’s called Eppiflex, plastic laser cut templates in various shapes that can be used repeatedly without wearing out. They are transparent for precise placing and fussy cutting, bendable yet with edges firm enough for precise folding, whip and ladder stitch friendly, easily removable and heat resistant so you can press over them. They sound amazing. The down side is they are much more expensive than paper pieces (about £12 for a pack of 50) but if you used, for example, 2 inch squares in most of your projects they would probably be worth the investment. Anyway I will give them a try at some point and let you know what I think of them. If you have tried them, please let us know what your verdict is. (Check them out at Sewhot.co.uk or look for the video on Youtube)

I did get a little English Paper Piecing done here and there; not what I had planned to do originally (as usual) but I began a few simple mini quilts that I was in the mood for at the time. Of course they are not finished. I sometimes think it would be better to show you one thing that was finished, rather than a number of things part done, but I always seem to have several things on the go at the same time.

I plan to add more to each of them They are all a bit dull at the moment. The first one is a 8 inch block I am going to call ‘Wishing Star’. I have not decided what I want to do with it but I like the gold against the black.

The second one is a traditional American block called ‘Garden of Eden’, which I thought would be fun to complete with a garden of Eden theme in fabric, hence the leaves and apples. I plan to embroider something in the horizontal yellow bar, a leafy scroll, a couple of small figures, or perhaps a serpent. What do you think?

It’s just sitting on its backing fabric of apples at the moment and is roughly tacked around the edges. Those stitches will disappear later and some hand quilting will make it look more interesting. It also an 8 inch block.

The third mini quilt I began was again a traditional block called ‘Castle Wall’. I thought as we have several castles dotted about Scotland I might add some tartan and enclose a unicorn (our national animal) within the castle walls (I did a previous post called ‘Scotland’s Unicorn’ in January 2019 if you are interested in scrolling back.)

There are navy blue stars beyond the castle walls though you can’t see them very well here. I lived in a castle in Scotland for a year, once. Here is a photo of their courtyard. It’s quite something, isn’t it?

*Megginch Castle courtyard, Perthshire*.

There is more to say about the Castle Wall block so I will come back to it in another post, perhaps when this little unicorn quilt is finished.

Lastly I began a larger quilt of roughly 15 inches square, made from almost a whole Moda charm pack called ‘Once Upon A Chicken’. The strange thing is, though, charm packs don’t seem to have much tonal variety; not this one anyway. You can see how flat this one looks; there is not the depth that you can achieve with light medium and dark fabrics within the same quilt. Perhaps they are designed to be added to, so I could of course replace some of the pieces here with other darker or plainer fabrics but I think I am just going to leave it as it is. I am hoping that some dark brown quilting stitches and binding, and perhaps embroidering the chicken in the centre, will give the whole thing a bit more life. If not, I’ll know what I need to do next time.

It looks strange like this, all the paper pieces fabric wrapped but none of them sewn together.

Since my last post I have added a Contact page to this site (find the link at the top of my Home page) so that you can get in touch with me if you have any general questions about my work orA its availability. I have also added a Paypal button on my Shop page, which is for UK purchases only for the moment. I shall be listing many more products on my Shop page in the coming months. Purchases from abroad are probably better made on my Folksy site. This is all still a work in progress but will get sorted out in due course.

So, till next time….

This is Macz, sunning himself on the warm steps outside my back door.

6 EPP Problems & Ways to Fix Them

November 12, 2019November 8, 2020 / lesleyjjackson / Leave a comment

I will try to keep this post brief because I didn’t get any response to my question as to whether a post on this subject would be useful, so I’m guessing that maybe most people would rather figure out something as they go. But, just in case these tips are useful to someone, I am going to post them anyway. Here are a few potential problems and a few possible solutions:

Shock Horror, a Hole!

You have through your fabric by mistake and make a small hole. This is most likely to happen when you are preparing to add binding. You cut away your batting to the quilt size and accidentally snip through the backing fabric. It feels like you have ruined everything. The backing fabric is quilted on and can’t be removed. You can’t face unpicking it all and starting again. You don’t want to waste all the backing fabric for one tiny hole, but if you try to mend it, it will show. What do you do?

First you mend the hole so it is secure. Then you find a creative way to cover it. Of course it depends where the hole is, but you can usually find a way to embroider, appliqué or patch over it in a way that is no longer visible. Then repeat this decoration in other areas of your quilt, so that it looks like this was the intended pattern all along. Here is a my ‘Tulips and Roses’ quilt where I made a very tiny snip in the backing fabric but the mend still showed like a small slub.

To get around that I used the same fabric that was in each nine patch to add a small chequered ‘brackets’ across the binding to cover it, and then repeated this with one each edge and beneath my label. Here is the back of the quilt (below). Can you see the chequered brackets? Strangely, I think I like it better with these additions.

Help! Some of the Pattern has been Gobbled up!

2. You have fussy cut images around the edges of your quilt, or added embroideries that need to be seen whole. You haven’t thought ahead to the binding and then, when you start to add it you realise that this will chop off a part of your pattern and spoil the overall look.

The solution is to add more quilt to your edges. Add a border right the way around, a couple of borders, a pieced edge, or a frame. You can use four narrow strips as I did, or a series of narrow rectangles sewn together. You can make these EPP shapes in the usual way and attach them with your preferred way of stitching, to the quilt edges. Then you can quilt stitch over them or leave them plain. If you have enough backing material you can bring the backing to the front to serve as binding, but if not, you may have to add pieces to your backing fabric to make it larger. Alternatively you can add a separate binding to the raw edges. When I was making ‘Dog Log’ (below) I had to add four new

grey strips around the edges to prevent my backing fabric covering up the images.

Oh No! One Block is Wonky!

3. You have completed your quilt top and removed the papers around the centre and then noticed that one piece is not straight and has gone unnoticed before. This often happens when you use stripes or squares and find that one block’s stripes are not straight or the checks are uneven at the edges. Do you leave it even though it bothers you every time you look at it? How do you fix it?

The answer is that you remove the piece and redo it. First you must stabilise the area around the piece you want to remove. Put the papers back into all the pieces that surround it and baste them to secure them. I would even sew through the papers in this case to make sure they are really stable (I always sew through my papers but I know a lot of people don’t). Then remove the problem piece, starch it if you want, iron it, re baste it around a new piece of paper, check that the block now looks the way you want on the front and re-insert it into the quilt, stitching it in the usual way to all the surrounding pieces. Remove the paper in that piece and then in all the pieces that surround it. This happened to me with my ‘Whitley’ Bay quilt below:

The darker, large check piece next to the upper right of the yacht in the centre shows more of a blue line of checks at one end than the other (yes I know it’s only a little but I hated it), so I removed the whole piece and reinstated it so that the top and bottom edges both finished on a line of white squares.

A Piece is Too Small or Too Short!

4. You are joining pieces together in a quilt and somehow you have cut a piece too short. This often happens when making a log cabin quilt and you have lots of long pieces, which have a habit of not meeting where we want them to. You don’t want to have to cut more pieces or maybe you don’t have any more fabric the same. What can you do?

When we learn to make quilts we are told to leave a 1/4 seam allowance around our shapes and a little more around EPP shapes. Actually, you can leave up to half an inch for safety and cut it off later if you want to. I find this extra seam allowance gives body to the finished quilt and it doesn’t show. I always allow extra when making log cabin blocks, because it means there is a little more fabric at either end of each ‘log’ to extend you piece by the small amount you may need, without causing a problem. The wonderful thing about EPP is that pieces can be adjusted easily and re sewn, provided you have enough seam allowance to allow small changes in length or direction. In ‘Tiny Dancer’ (below), my two outer cream pieces were cut too short and I didn’t have any more fabric the same. However, I had just enough seam allowance to fix the problem.

Arrgh! All the right pieces are in place but they don’t fit together!

5. This is an odd thing about EPP. You often have to sew the blocks in a certain direction. So if you have this problem check out another way of sewing it together. This is a common problem when piecing 6 and 8 point Stars and adding tiny squares all the way around a larger square. You find that once you get to the end, the whole thing is lopsided (or in the case of the stars, the points don’t meet). You might have the same number of squares on each side but on the final side it looks as if you have more and you can’t understand why. I had this problem with ‘Into the Woods’ (below) and you can see (at the bottom right) that I tried to extend the centre square to make it fit but that made it worse. The square was already the right size.

The solution was to remove the strips of squares and rectangles on each side and sew them back on in a different order, the top and bottom first and then the two sides. This keeps the centre balanced and prevents one side moving out of kilter.

I hate those sticky out ‘ear’s on my triangles and diamonds and I want to chop them off!

6. Well, I know how you feel. ~You get this urge to snip them away, even just a bit, because it’s annoying trying to manipulate them into place and tidy them away.

I borrowed this picture from a wonderful EPP site messyjessecrafts.blogspot.co.uk because I didn’t have a suitable photo.

The answer is don’t. In regular quilting you can chop all sorts of bits off to reduce bulk. With EPP you need to live with these ‘ears’ and learn ways to tuck them in because to chop them off, at worst makes holes and at best weakens the points where they meet other pieces, and risks them coming away from each other in time. You can learn to nest them neatly on the while the ones at your quilt edges will be covered by borders or binding. They are a necessary part of EPP so learn to take care of them!

I am late in posting because we seem to have had a long bout of bad luck. My husband is ill, I have a knee injury, one of my ducks flew away and has not returned, another duck is lame, with a foot infection and the constant heavy rain, and lack of light that accompanies it, makes everything more difficult and dreary.

I began well, trying to finish my series of armchairs but life has got in the way and I have only been able to finish one more, though I have made decent headway on the others.

After a while I added a cat but have not sewn it down yet as I am not sure I like it.

I think I have put too many scattered embroidery stitches on it.

I hope to have more to show you in my next post. Goodness, it will almost Christmas by then!

Till next time…..

A Near Relative called Appliqué

June 25, 2019July 9, 2019 / lesleyjjackson / Leave a comment

The owl I made for an artist friend, Lisa Hooper. It is a copy of her driftwood sculpture.

Appliqué comes from the French word ‘appliquer’ meaning to ‘put on’ or ‘apply’ one piece of fabric to another, either by hand or machine. The raw edges of the pieces being applied can be turned under and sewn or simply covered with decorative stitching.

Appliqué has been around for thousands of years, all across the globe. It began as a useful way of repairing small holes and tears in clothing that was passed down over generations until it became a useful way of decorating textiles for a myriad of uses, from wrapping infants to shrouding the dead.

This was a small experiment in Crazy Quilting. The heart can now be appliquéd onto something.

Traditional variations include bonded appliqué, broderie perse, cut away or reverse appliqué, shadow appliqué, fabric collage and Mola work. It’s worth finding out more about each of these.

Very recently, appliqué has had a massive revival as the boundaries of these older techniques have been stretched to encompass experiments with colour and texture, layering and overlaying and incorporating a range of materials such as jewellery or metal, with new and exciting results. Contemporary appliqué has now come to be regarded as an art form in its own right and it forms a huge part of surface decoration in modern textile design.

The swallow I made for another friend, who ran ‘The Swallow Theatre’ close to where `I live..

But what does that have to do with EPP? Well, it’s this: There are some simple and easy appliqué techniques you can use to aid or enhance your EPP work. I think of appliqué as a near relative that it’s fun to visit from time to time, for a bit of fun.

1. A group of shapes that have been used to complete a pattern in English Paper Piecing can be appliquéd onto a larger fabric background, rather than adding more pieces to form a quilt. For example you could appliqué this ring of pieced hexagons onto a cotton carrier bag, or a row of smaller ones onto a pillow case . This technique works well when you want to try out individual blocks or designs and finish them quickly, and when you are not ready to try something larger.

A group of hexagons flowers in blue Laura Ashley fabric, made so long ago and now languishing in a box.

2. If you want to give your shapes a slightly raised look you could appliqué, say, a single hexagon flower in the centre of each patchwork square in a mini quilt. Appliquéing them on will allow the flowers to pop forward because they sit a little proud of their background. If you like, you could even stuff the flowers with washable wadding. In this cot quilt ‘Pastel Bows’, I appliquéd on the centre of each bow and stuffed it.

‘Pastel Bows’ with stuffed centres.

3. Paper inserts inside shapes to be appliquéd give the shapes body and keep corners sharp and neat.

The basket and the bunny were appliquéd on after the patchwork was completed.

After your fabric shapes are completed and pressed, the papers can be removed and the shape easily stitched to a background fabric without losing its definition.

4. EPP shapes have edges that are already turned under, making it easy to hand appliqué using invisible stitches.

A rectangle of fabric tacked/basted to a paper insert. I usually use white paper but any colour will do.

5. Appliqué is a way of adding complementary colours, fabrics and designs to embellish what could otherwise be rather plain. In this quilt pattern ‘Over the Orchard’ by Kajsa Wikman (from the book ‘Quilts Baby!’ by Linda Kopp), you can see that without the appliqué in the centre panels, it wouldn’t have nearly as much personality.

I am part way through making a version of this quilt which I have called, ‘Over the Hills’. The edges are done and I have hills, groups of conifers, a farm cottage and some birds ready to add to the various centre sections. Just the appliqués to sew down and it will be ready to assemble and be quilted. Here it is in progress:

6. Appliqué can be used as a means of adding a border (or multiple borders) to your finished quilt top or if you want to enlarge a small quilt, to display inside a larger picture frame for example. When I put the binding on the ‘Dog Log’ below, I found that the folded edge sliced off a piece of each of the images at the sides. I have now unpicked the binding to appliqué a narrow border onto all four sides. These will butt up against the squares with the images without any overlapping and allow them to be seen clearly. Then I will re-attach the binding to the new border.

‘Dog Log’ mini quilt.

7. Appliqué is a perfect way to create a pictorial quilt. Appliquéd shapes don’t have to be geometrical because you are not piecing them together. This means you can use any shape you like. This mini quilt ‘Down in the Glen’ shows how you can use appliqué on a patched background.

Appliquéd house and trees using squares, rectangles and conical shapes, on a patched background.

I always use paper shapes inside my appliqué in true EPP style because I find the paper acts as a stabiliser but you can make shapes without papers. If you do use papers, don’t forget to remove them before you sew your shapes down! Otherwise you end up with a crackly project that you can’t wash (yes, I have done that on more than one occasion!). You can use a fine stabiliser like Pellon and leave it in if you don’t plan to wash your work, or you can use wash-away appliqué sheets in place of papers but they are thicker and I find them harder to work with.

8. Here, a ” A Song of Eggs and Feathers’, shows the focus is entirely on the appliqué rather than part of an overall design. Pictorial elements have been applied to square of printed cotton rather than a patched background.Each separate piece of the birds has been made using a paper shape wrapped with cloth before stitching it down and embroidering over it. This is more exacting than patchwork but also more fun.

‘A Song of Eggs and Feathers’, made for a poet friend, Ann Gray. Multiple shapes appliquéd to a printed cotton background.

‘Murmuration’ (below) is a mini quilt that I am working on at the moment, where I have taken a fabric print that I love and added a little appliqué to suggest dusk in Scotland with a sky full of birds.

The border is pieced but I have appliquéd on the cottage, the smoke from the chimney, the hill and the fence using paper inserts that were removed after pressing. I have starting adding some embroidery but there will be more to come and of course the hand quilting and binding.

If you are a patchworker or English Paper Piecer, have you given appliqué a try?

till next time…

(PS – apologies for using photos from earlier blog posts but I don’t make things fast enough to be able to show you new things as examples.)

An English Paper Piecing Journey

Crafting by hand In a corner of Scotland

EPP Mini Quilts

Taking Stock at this Stage of the Journey

Little Steps with Mini Quilts

6 EPP Problems & Ways to Fix Them

A Near Relative called Appliqué

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