by the EPP bug.
I wrote about starting a new project a few posts ago. It's English Paper Piecing or EPP for short. I have been making progress on it, in that I have all my fabric cut for the 55 blocks I want for this quilt, and am in the process of getting those basted and ready to sew. I try not to sew any of the hexies together when I'm at home and can be working on other projects and using my machines, but the bug has hit me hard, and all I want to do is sew hexies together.
I have 3 blocks complete, and started on blocks 4 and 5. Here is block 3.
I also picked up some 1/2" hexies that a local store had on sale, including an acrylic template. I just had to try sewing those together, and I wanted to try fussy cutting my fabrics. They turned out so cute... but then I think anything made miniature is cute. :-)
I'm not sure yet what I'm going to use these small flowers for, I just wanted to try them out. But I'm thinking I need a few more, and then use them for a notebook cover. Next I want to try 1/4" hexies... those are going to be a challenge, being so small, but I can't wait to see how those look when sewn together.
I have been doing a lot of surfing looking for ideas for other EPP projects, and it's going to be hard to pick just one. I found a book called The New Hexagon: 52 Block to English Paper Piece. It is out of print, but I was able to find a digital copy of it at Paper Pieces. The author has combined different shapes to create some beautiful hexagons. And she had a few Quilt Alongs in the past years, using those pieced hexies.
She also released a perpetual calendar, with a different block design for every day. Unfortunately, that is discontinued, and I can't find it at a reasonable price anywhere. But I was able to get her second book, The New Hexagon 2: 52 More blocks to English Paper Piece. Most of what I have seen of her quilts she uses Tula Pink and Kaffe Fassett fabrics, which are not my favorite designs, although I understand why so many people like them.
Paper Pieces also has template packages for each book, although I haven't purchased them yet. The templates aren't necessary, with the digital book, you can print each page, and trace the images to get your templates, and the second book has pages of "patterns" that you can trace for each of the shapes that are used. Although depending on how often I want to make the different hexagons, it may be nice to have the templates.
In my surfing I also found another pattern that really caught my eye, and is more my style. A quilter named Lucy Boston (1892 - 1990) designed approximately 20 patchwork quilts and she was an author of children's books. The pattern that kept coming up in my searches is Patchwork of the Crosses. It uses Honeycomb shapes for all the blocks, then the connecting pieces to put them all together. The fabric is fussy cut and just about any fabric can be used and still look beautiful.
But before I start cutting fabric for another EPP project, I want to get further along in the first project I started, and I need to get some of my other quilt projects worked on.