Happy Slow Stitching Sunday! You guys, I have finally been sewing again for the first time since moving back to North Carolina! I had so much fun making the tiny 3/8" hexie rosettes for Stonefields Quilt blocks #14 & 15 back in September, so I decided that making a few of the 168 larger 3/4" hexie rosettes that I will need for my border might be a good task to ease myself out of my stitching slump. It turned out to be the perfect choice. As Tula Pink says, you have to eat your elephant one little bite at a time.
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| 3 Rosettes Completed, 165 More Needed for Stonefields Quilt Border |
I would have finished more than three of these, but I spent about two hours ransacking my studio closets, bins and drawers searching for my All Points Patchwork: English Paper Piecing Beyond the Hexagon... book by Diane Gilleland. (This post contains affiliate links). To my supreme irritation, I never did find it. I was also unable to locate my little black and gold pack of John James size 12 Milliners needles, even though I swear I remember finding them mixed in with unrelated supplies when I was unpacking. Where, oh where did I put those needles? Before I moved, I could put my hands on just about any book, tool or notion in less than 5 minutes. A place for everything and everything in its place and all that. Well, I caved and ordered more needles on Amazon, but I did not buy another copy of the book as it's sure to turn up sooner or later.
My Stonefields Quilt (pattern by Susan Smith is getting harder to find, but there is still one copy available on Etsy here) was purchased from a quilt shop and came kitted with the necessary EPP template papers for 3/4" hexagons. I can't remember whether this nifty windowed acrylic template for fussy cutting came with the kit as well, or if I purchased it separately from Paper Pieces. For hexies that I wanted to cut from stripes or centering specific printed motifs from my fabric, I traced around the template with a mechanical pencil and sandpaper beneath the fabric, then cut the hexies out individually with scissors.
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| Tracing Acrylic Template Prior to Cutting Hexies With Scissors |
These flowers from my Tilda fabric were cut in the same way, centering the template window on the flowers and tracing around them one by one with pencil, then cutting out each shape with scissors. So much fun! But OH SO SLOW...
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| More Fussy Cutting With Window Template |
There was a silver lining to the chaos in my studio and the missing EPP book, because after wasting two hours looking for things I never found, I wasted invested a couple more hours going down a rabbit hole of YouTube English Paper Piecing tutorials, trying to find the method I used successfully for the smaller hexie rosettes I made four months ago. Remember that I am an EPP newbie, and making two of something is not enough repetition to ingrain everything indelibly in my brain.
As it turns out, there are quite a few different methods and hotly defended opinions out there in the Quiltyverse about the "best way" to do EPP. Imagine that -- quilters having differences of opinion! HAH. But the absolute gold mine treasure I discovered was a series of three EPP tutorial videos that Tula Pink filmed for the Fat Quarter Shop in 2001. Y'all, I have admired Tula Pink as a talented artist and designer for years, but after watching these videos I realize that she is also a phenomenal teacher. Even if you have been sewing EPP for years and are set in your ways, I highly recommend watching these videos as you're bound to pick up a trick or two to make your process faster, more efficient, and/or more enjoyable. The first video in the series is How to English Paper Piece with Tula Pink - Part 1 - Cutting. One of the many tips in that video for shaving time off your process without compromising results was to SKIP IRONING unless your fabric has a really deep set crease, since minor wrinkles in the fabric would smooth themselves out when you baste the patches to your EPP templates. So I tried it with this one:
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| I Resisted the Strong Urge to Iron |
Those of you who know me will understand that it was REALLY HARD not to iron that pink fabric scrap nice and smooth before cutting out the hexies, but Tula was right. They are fine after basting them:
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| Not So Bad After Basting |
You know I still feel a strong urge to iron them, but then I remember Tula in the video talking about how there are a lot of quilts she wants to make before she dies so she's going to skip any extra steps that don't make a difference in the finished quilt. And I have to agree with her, ironing the fabric before cutting the hexies would make them look better in the pictures today, but wouldn't make any difference at all in the finished quilt.
This got me thinking about where else I could shave off seconds, minutes or hours without compromising end results. Fussy cutting is so impactful in EPP, but I still need to cut out hundreds of hexagons out of solid and allover print fabrics for this quilt. Even rotary cutting around my little acrylic template seems like too much bother for those, so I headed over to the AccuQuilt website to look for die cutting options. Well, they do make a 3/4" hexie die, but it's only for the Studio 2 cutter that I don't own and have no plans to purchase, as that cutter costs about $800. Nope! Then I noticed that the AccuQuilt 1" English Paper Piecing Qube set is now on clearance for $120, down from the original price of $536. Judging by the product reviews, the reason it's on clearance is that AccuQuilt designed it with 1/4" seam allowances rather than the 3/8" seam allowances many prefer for EPP and people were frustrated trying to turn too-small seam allowances over the edges of their templates. Mind you, not every reviewer felt the seam allowances were too small -- the thickness of the template material will affect how much seam allowance there is to wrap around to the back side when you're basting, so those using freezer paper or copy paper for their templates may find the 1/4" SA adequate while those using cardstock or cereal box cardboard are more likely to find them skimpy.
My friend Karen of Quilts...etc. tells me that she has been using her 1" AccuQuilt hexagon die to cut out patches for her 7/8" hexie projects and I am hoping that they will work for my 3/4" hexies that are just a little smaller than hers. If not, I can always buy papers for 7/8" shapes to use with the fabric dies and not use the paper template cutting dies. There are four shapes in the set, all with 1" finished sides: a hexagon, a half hexagon, a diamond, and an equilateral triangle. At the clearance price that works out to $30 per fabric die even if I never used any of the paper cutting dies at all. I should mention that AccuQuilt does make a standalone 1" hexagon die for EPP that I considered, currently priced at $69.99. (They sell the same die for the same price on Amazon here, with the advantage of not having to spend $200 to get free shipping). I considered that one, but opted for the clearance Qube set instead because I prefer the smaller, separate dies for fabric and paper that you get with the Qube set over the larger individual die with both fabric and paper cut in one pass, since I'm not planning on cutting any paper at all. I also think there's a good chance I'll eventually want to try some of the other shapes in the set. So I'll try to remember to revisit this blog post after my 1" EPP Qube dies come and let you know how they work with my 3/4" templates. 🤞
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| Thread Basting My Hexies (With a Swipe of Glue) |
So as you can see in the above photo of my ridiculously tiny end table that is really only big enough for a drink and a remote control, I am trying to get organized and streamline my process to make this hand stitching more portable. The method I learned from the book I can't find involves one swipe of glue across the middle of the paper template, just to hold it in place temporarily while you fold the edges down and tack stitch just through each corner of fabric, never stitching into the paper itself. The glue annoys me and sometimes it doesn't want to release easily when it's time to pull the papers out, but sticking a pin through paper and fabric would annoy me even more and when I skip the glue swipe, the template tends to shift as I'm basting around it. Now, I'm using a giant, fat stick of clear fabric glue, Collins brand from JoAnn that I probably bought 10 years ago. It's labeled "fabric glue stick," but it doesn't say anything about it being a temporary fabric glue stick. Digging through my stash of glue sticks, many of them leftover school supplies, I was horrified to see that some of the glue sticks I'd been planning to use on fabric were actually labeled PERMANENT glue sticks. I did not even know such a thing existed! So I ordered some of the thin purple SewLine Fabric Glue Pens that Tula recommended from Amazon. They are acid free and archival, so they won't damage fabric if they happen not to get washed out, the glue goes on purple so you can see it but then dries clear, and supposedly it is easier to control and put small amounts just where you need it without it turning into a big, goopy mess. I am even going to try glue basting my hexies to the templates again when this glue pen comes, because Tula says she can glue baste 200 hexies in the same amount of time it would take her to thread baste 50 of them. I hate glue, but the time savings do warrant giving that method another try. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, I'm basting like this, with neutral ivory 50/3 Gutermann cotton thread and a size 10 Milliners needle. Some people use whatever odd thread spools need to be used up for basting, but I'm using a light neutral because I won't need to remove any of the basting stitches since I'm not sewing through my papers. A random dark basting thread would show through light patches in the finished quilt.
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| Thread Basting My Hexies with 3/8 Inch Seam Allowances |
I am selecting and cutting hexagons for one rosette at a time and needed a way to keep sets of 7 hexagons together until I was ready to stitch them. I had a big bag of these little 2" x 3" ziplock baggies that we found in my father-in-law's office -- the size a jeweler might use when you drop off a ring for resizing, or that might be used to attach extra buttons to a readymade blouse. I found more of them on Amazon here. They are very useful and of course reusable.
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| Mini Ziplock Baggies Organize Hexies for Each Rosette |
When whipstitching the basted hexagons together, I had been using a single Clover Wonder Clip to hold the two patches together for stitching, like this:
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| Wonder Clip Holds Hexies in Place for Stitching |
The Wonder Clips work great, but sometimes my thread gets caught up on the clip while I'm stitching. In one of her EPP videos for Fat Quarter Shop, Tula Pink mentioned that she switched to using SewTites magnetic bars instead of Wonder Clips for that reason, and I remembered that I'd purchased some Mini SewTites but had never gotten around to trying them out. Miraculously, I located them in my studio!
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| Trying Out SewTites Minis Instead of Wonder Clips |
The verdict? All is well and good until the metal back part of the SewTite slips off your lap, down into the crevice of the leather couch, never to be seen again... Okay, seriously: With my 3/4" hexie size, the Wonder Clip is faster and easier to snap in place for stitching versus fiddling with the two-part magnet bar and metal backing strip of the SewTite, which need to be positioned on either side of your work (without dropping anything, ahem). Where the SewTite was really superior to the Wonder Clip was when I sewed the next seam after this one, the seam between that last gold hexie and the Dorothy hexie in the center, because I was able to position the SewTite right below the seam I was stitching even though I wasn't near an edge. The Wonder Clips only work when you're securing near an edge, whereas SewTites can be positioned in the middle of a bunch of EPP that's already been sewn. So I think each notion has its place, and it's worth having a couple of each of them in my EPP kit.
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| Another Tula Tip: Whipstitch With Needle Perpendicular to the Seam |
Another tip from Tula Pink's videos was to keep your needle perpendicular to the seam line when whipstitching EPP. Doing it this way, the longest diagonal part of the whipstitch is on the back of the work, and the shortest part of the whipstitch is what is (barely) visible on the right side of the quilt. I'm using my cream colored 100 wt MicroQuilter thread from Superior Threads to whipstitch my EPP and I am just giddy in love with how effortlessly it glides through the fabric, no need to even bother with a thimble, and it creates stitches that just melt into the weave of the fabric. This is super fine, super strong thread designed for long arm quilting but I love it for EPP. I use the smallest size Milliners needle that I can find with this thread, a size 11. The needle pack I misplaced was John James Milliners Size 11, and when I gave up looking for them, I ordered a pack of Jen Kingwell's Milliners Size 11 needles because they were available for next day delivery with Amazon Prime, and they work just as nicely.
I should note that Tula Pink recommends using shorter appliqué needles instead of long milliners/straw needles, with the rationale that pulling a longer needle through with every stitch is wasted energy and a larger motion that may lead to earlier fatigue and soreness after hours and hours of stitching (like we do). I was thinking about that while I was stitching this Dorothy rosette last night and paying attention to how much needle I was pulling through with each stitch. Might have to give my applique needles a try. One thing I can say for sure is that SIZE MATTERS with needles -- before my size 11 needles showed up in my mailbox, I was using the same size 10 milliners needle for whipstitching that I use for basting with the thicker thread. As soon as I switched from the size 10 back to the size 11, I immediately noticed that my needle was sliding through the edges of my hexagons with less resistance.
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| MicroQuilter Thread for the WIN, Baby! Do YOU See Any Stitches? |
Here are a couple of Rear View photos of completed rosettes:
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| Completed Rosettes, Back Side |
I've popped out the templates behind the center hexagon in each rosette. The other templates will remain until I'm ready to stitch all the rosettes to the borders. Those basting stitches can stay just like they are, no need to remove them since I used a basting thread that won't show through any of my fabrics.
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| Same Rosettes, Front View |
These were so much fun to make. I can't wait to get a whole bunch of them cut out and kitted up for sewing on the go. I will sew them in a box, I will sew them with a fox, I will sew them here and there, I'll sew hexies EVERYWHERE! 😄
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| The Unimaginable Cuteliness of the Finished Rosette |
And how much do I love that MicroQuilter thread? Let's zoom in for a close up:
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| Magical MicroQuilter Thread for Invisible EPP Stitches! |
I'm swooning... The only inconvenient thing about MicroQuilter thread for EPP is that I bought 3,000 yard cones of it, thinking I'd use it for stitching in the ditch on my long arm quilting machine. Those are a bit big to carry around in a hand sewing kit, especially if you want to bring a cream, a gray, and a beige so you can choose whichever color blends best with your fabrics. So I came up with this idea, using more of those little ziplock baggies that I mentioned earlier, and some leftover M Class jumbo bobbins from my previous APQS long arm machine.
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| MicroQuilter To Go, No Tangling, No Drop-And-Roll Hazard |
I wound up a full M Class bobbin of Cream, Light Gray and Beige MicroQuilter using the bobbin winder on my Bernina Q24 long arm machine. I didn't want to use any of my Bernina bobbins because they cost about $5 each, whereas these generic aluminum bobbins that cost about fifty cents each work just fine for this purpose. Then I threaded the thread tail of each bobbin through a nice, FAT hand stitching needle and poked a hole with the needle from the inside of the bag, out through the bottom. (Why such a big, thick needle? I wanted to minimize the abrasion my thread would be subjected to as I pulled it through the hole in the plastic bag). Once I'd squeezed out the extra air and sealed the bag, I can tug the thread tail to pull off one forearm's length of thread as needed without the bobbin rolling across the waiting room and getting stuck under some doctor's office fish tank. I am super pleased with myself for this idea. Since the MicroQuilter thread is so fine, each bobbin is holding about 138 yards of thread, enough to last me a long, LONG time hand stitching.
Today's post was written for my own personal benefit, since I won't remember any of this 6 months from now and the Internet is just about the only thing I CAN'T misplace in my studio. When I first tried English Paper Piecing 10 years ago, I was discouraged because I didn't like how my whipstitches looked on the front of my work:
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| My First EPP Attempt, August of 2016 |
There were a LOT of other things I didn't know and was doing wrong with that block (like I should not have combined machine piecing the 9-patch with seams pressed to one side, and then trying to EPP that as an octagonal unit), but what stopped me from keeping at it and trying to get better was feeling that the visible whipstitching detracted from the block. I didn't want to go to all that work and then see stitching on the front of my work that looks ugly to me -- I am not going around judging everyone else's EPP and sneering if I can see your whipstitching, I promise! It's just that my preference for my own work is that, if I am going to take all of the extra time and trouble to hand stitch a quilt block, I want the stitching on the right side of the block to look just as unobtrusive as a seam stitched on my sewing machine in a fraction of the time.
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| Same Fabric "Do-Over," This Time Foundation Paper Pieced By Machine |
The second version of that quilt block was foundation paper pieced on my vintage Singer Featherweight machine, and I was so much happier with the results. I didn't attempt any more English paper piecing for a long time after that!
And now, here I am, heading back to the couch with a hot cup of tea and another stack of hexagons with a big, dopey grin. The moral to this blog post is, if you try following one tutorial and results fall short of expectations, try another tutorial from a different teacher, using different methods and different tools or materials. What works great for one person might not work the best for you, but that doesn't mean there isn't a different method out there for basting, or a different needle or a different kind of thread that would make all the difference to your success. If at first you don't succeed, waste wait 10 years and try it again.
Weekly Stitching Goals
Well, I finally did install the firmware update on my Bernina B990 sewing machine, so that one is crossed off! Looking forward to the week ahead:
- I'm tired of looking at these boxes. I need to finish unpacking and organizing my sewing supplies in my new studio so I can find things when I need them.
- Continue with my Stonefields border hexies (3 down, 165 more to go) and get supplies packed up for portable hand sewing
- Prep the next Stonefields appliqué block
I'm linking up today's post with my favorite linky parties:
MONDAY
Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts
Monday Musings at Songbird Designs
TUESDAY
To-Do Tuesday at Quilt Schmilt
WEDNESDAY
Wednesday Wait Loss at The Inquiring Quilter
THURSDAY
Needle and Thread Thursday at My Quilt Infatuation
FRIDAY
Finished or Not Friday at Alycia Quilts
Off the Wall Friday at Nina Marie Sayre
Beauty Pageant at From Bolt to Beauty
TGIFF Thank Goodness It’s Finished Friday, rotates, schedule found here: TGIF Friday
SUNDAY
Frédérique at Quilting Patchwork Appliqué
Slow Stitching Sunday at Kathy's Quilts
Oh Scrap! at Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework
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