You’ll soon see that I like to have multiple projects going at once. While I love machine sewing, some times I like to go back to my roots, where it all started, and do some hand sewing in the way of English Paper Piecing (EPP).
I first discovered EPP 6 or so years ago, I fell in love with the portability of it and it was more enjoyable to me than crochet or knitting. I didn’t have to follow a pattern I could just stitch, stitch, stitch. Mindlessly relaxing. I could lounge on the couch or in bed while rewatching Firefly or Bones or some other show I enjoy watching for the umpteenth time. You can’t always do that with machine sewing, it can be loud and hard to hear a show or podcast, even with headphones. I loved how I could toss it in my bag and work on it at my leisure in the car or wherever we went, you definitely can’t do that with machine sewing….
I had this great idea all those years ago to start saving small squares of lots of fabrics so that I could create a hexie quilt where each hexagon was a different fabric. Through moves and life changes I would forget and remember my mission many times. Now, 6 years later. I only have 100 some odd individual hexies set aside and have now realized if I want to make a huge queen or king size quilt I would need over 3,000 hexies. THREE THOUSAND!!! I truly wonder how long it would actually take for me to track down 3,000 unique fabrics for each of the squares, or possibly, how expensive?! I’ve thought about trying to initiate a “mail along” scrap swap where we have a list of people and the box gets mailed down the line. One person will get the box, take the scraps they want, add some new scraps of their own, and send it to the next person on the list. I still think it would be a fun thing to do, but I don’t have enough scrap lovin’ friends to have much of a mailing list to accomplish that at this point. In the past, I’ve done sewing jobs for fabric someone could spare and I’ve also bought several scrap bundles off of etsy to try to fill my scrappy quilt desires. I’m starting to think this quilt won’t be so big, or it will continue being an ongoing project for many years to come… we’ll see how this develops I suppose.
For now, you can follow this link to a video of my glue basting all my scraps I currently have. I’m brand new to glue basting, but wow! Am I converted already?! Before I’ve always basted my hexies with a needle and thread, but man, is it time consuming? Sometimes I’m a person that gets bored and wants to move on if the steps to the fun are long and tedious, but glue basting makes that process so quick that I can move on to the fun sewing-things-together part and not get bored. The glue stick I’m using is what was recommended to me from other EPP’ers, which is sewline glue stick (not a sponsor).
I plan on talking about my favorite hand sewing stitch and piecing process in other posts, but in other news… I got a new iron!
My iron of 13+ years died on me. So, I took to amazon and searched for irons and read reviews until I found an iron with enough reviews that complained about the weight of the iron and thought “that’s the iron for me!” I love a good, heavy iron that will do a lot of the work of me. It also gave my several days of sad reflection while I couldn’t sew to realize I probably need to get a back up iron, eventually. For that, I will have to wait until I can find a good one at a thrift store...
Hexagon Count: 130
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