English paper piecing, or EPP, is something I’ve always loved the look of, but have no patience for the time it takes! Someday, I would like to slow down and have handwork projects sitting close by for me to work on a little at a time. This week, I decided I would try to mimic the look of some of these EPP projects. They all have something in common…. Very tiny pieces :)
I had this beautiful collection of fat quarters in shades of blue. This project didn’t use much of those fat quarters, two 1½” wide x 22” long strips of each color to be exact.
I cut the 1½” blue strips into 1½” diamonds using my TINY ruler. I used the flat tip of the ruler to trim both tips off to help with piecing accuracy. Each star takes six tiny diamonds, so I stacked them up in sets before doing my layout.
Here, you can see the start of the layout. I decided to go for a 16” throw pillow. I wasn’t sure how much the dimensions would shrink with seam allowances taken out.
Now, for the background. I cut five 1½” wide x 44” long white background strips. From these, I cut about a million 1½” triangles ;) I also nipped the tips off all three corners using the flat tip of the ruler.
Here, you can see the basic block layout. Because the stars interlock with each other, you don’t actually sew the same color start points to each other. This block consists of three star points from three adjoining stars. Here is a printable coloring sheet with this star layout. Heavy grid lines delineate each block unit. You could make this at 1”, 2” or 3” finished scale.
These blocks go together in two subunits, the tip is one diamond and two triangles and the base is one triangle and two diamonds. I sewed each piece together, and pressed the seams open, before joining the top and bottom of the unit.
I have to say, for a unit that already has six pieces, this still felt pretty small going through my machine!
I began working my way across the layout building horizontal rows of blocks. I was pleased with the results, thus far, but progress was, uh, sloooooooow.... still faster than by hand though!
Finally, row one was done! And then on to row two, where things began to pick up speed.
Just look at how much that shrunk up! The top two rows are all sewn together, and the rest of my original layout is below them.
Here you can see all the rows laid out, and then sewn to each other. It came out just about the perfect size for a 16” square pillow!
This is just a fun pic showing the back before I quilted it. I like to press my seams open, on projects like this, because it helps alleviate the bulk at the centers of each star, making a very flat finish. This is what 308 tiny pieces look like all sewn and pressed. Whew!
I put the top on my longarm and did a sort of cathedral window/orange peel quilting design to help highlight each piece.
And here it is all done! For scale, you can see the gray/cream version of this star design is done in 2½” diamonds and triangles. I used the same process, but with fewer pieces and covered a 20” pillow.
Happy Sunday everyone,
Krista
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