English Paper Piercing With Quilting Cuddle®

Hi! It’s Sheila Ryan, Cuddle® Ambassador for Shannon Fabrics bringing you something new from South Texas!

I’m forever asking questions. What happens if… kinds of questions. Hanging out with quilty people just sparks all kinds of new questions. A couple of years ago I took a workshop offered by my local quilt guild (San Antonio Modern Quilt Guild - The Hot Tamales!) that was led by Joanna Marsh, who is an amazing long arm quilter and designer of incredible English Paper Piecing Quilt Patterns (you can see those marvels of engineering over on her Instagram. At the workshop we learned her method of tessellating English Paper Piecing  (EPP) Shapes out of fabrics with interesting elements to create fantastic stars. Did I buy all the templates and the pattern for making a whole Divination Quilt after just two hours of hand sewing carefully cut pieces of fabric together? Yes, yes I did! Have I made more than my two original stars? That’s not a question we ask out loud. It’s waiting for me!

In the meantime, Shannon Fabrics develops an interesting new fabric called Quilting Cuddle®. As part of the Cuddle® Ambassador team, I have been experimenting to see what kind of neat things we could make out of this lovely and innovative new fabric. It's a luscious plush minky-type fabric for sure, but with a lower 1.5mm pile, less stretch than regular Cuddle® fabric, and with gorgeous smaller prints than were possible on the longer pile Cuddle® fabrics. I've gone way off the deep end with my fascination for this fabric and am always wondering what kinds of projects will show off its great characteristics.

When I was up in Washington doing a Cuddle® up with BERNINA event for Shannon Fabrics at Sew-Creative in Wenatchee, my fellow Cuddle® Ambassador Mary Stevens showed me her little travel hand sewing project of English Paper Piecing - she has a stash of papers and picks up mini charm packs of cotton fabrics when she is out and about, and just bastes oodles of them while she is waiting, flying, in the passenger seat, wherever.

And then I started to connect the dots. At home I had the English Paper Piecing Accuquilt Qube (check your local quilt shop for all things Accuquilt) that I bought not long after that workshop with the guild (you know how we are - try one thing and then we have to collect all the "tools" and goodies to make it, and then life happens). Well, things lined up spectacularly as I started digging into the scraps of Quilting Cuddle® that were left over from random other Quilting Cuddle® experiments, making the papers and hexies with the Accuquilt Dies and the Go Bolt cutter, and pretty soon I had enough for a little "on-the-go" kit. 

The next thing I wondered was what I was going to do with all these little hexies, and so I scoured the Accuquilt website for insperation and they already had me covered. They had a pattern that used a few hexies on the outside of a generously sized needle book, so I printed out and added it to my project bag, with the question I needed to know the answer for scrawled across the top. I have started doing this with patterns that I print out so I remember what it is that I wanted to learn from the project! Otherwise they get printed out, set in a pile, and I have NO idea why I thought I wanted to make that!

For my next trip I was equipped with a project that didn’t require me to drag a sewing machine with me through the airport just so I wouldn’t be bored at the hotel while traveling. Or waiting in the car pick up line at the middle school, or riding around without something to keep my hands occupied.

 In no time at all (literally, it’s amazing how many hexies you can get basted and stitched together 5 minutes at a time) I had enough that I had learned some things about making EPP hexies with Quilting Cuddle®! First off I can use a bigger needle because the Quilting Cuddle® is a thicker fabric than cotton, and the thicker needle won’t bend. Bonus, bigger needles can have bigger eyes, which means I can still sew even if I forget my readers! AND because I was working with Quilting Cuddle® I figured that I could get away with using a regular sewing thread sized thread not the 60 or 80 weight threads that make teeny tiny stitches in quilting cotton virtually invisible. Also, we all know that when we are sewing with any Cuddle® fabric, the plushness of the fibers hide all kinds of wobbles, so you can really relax about the perfection of your stitches. You will never see them! The trick, though, is to go deep enough into the pile to catch the backing with your needle so that both pieces are held together with a quality stitch. After the required amount of hexies were joined together, I basted them onto the background fabric, then sewed them permanently to the background with a blanket stitch ( #7 from Mode 1 when I have my accufeed walking foot attached onto my Janome 6700 sewing machine) that was set at 4.0 mm long and 4.0 mm wide. The background becomes the outside of the needle book. And since you add layer of fusible fleece to whatever fabrics you are using to give the little needle book some structure, I did some straight line quilting through the hexies from point to point with a 3.5 mm long straight stitch. 

                

On the inside I wanted to keep everything soft and cuddly, so I used QC to bind the edge of a vinyl pocket that I added to the inside, used another scrap as a pin flap, and then used yet another tiny pair of scraps to have a nice place to insert working needles. 

  

Some pretty printed elastic got pulled into service to hold my glue stick and I added a 12 mm split ring to my Itty Bitty Scissors that another Cuddle® Ambassador, Lisa Leuck, gave me. I totally blame my addiction to using Accuquilt on her, as she does such amazing quilting (both piecing and longarming), and taught me the basics of how to "think in Accuquilt".

I added a pretty clay button that was orphaned by his compadres and alone in my button box and made a little crocheted cord from various Wonderfil rayon threads. Rayon thread is a little slippery, so the tassel end got a dab of clear Alleens glue to keep it tidy.

Overall, I am SUPER happy with my little Quilting Cuddle® Accuquilt-cut-EPP project book and now I need to go because I have more ideas for EPP that must get cut out for another “on-the-go” kit!

 If you see me sewing in the car when waiting for the kids at school drop-off or picl-up, just make sure that I’ve put the car in park! Oh, and the answer to my original question, Can you EPP with QC? The answer is definitely YES! Go try it and report back by sharing your EPP QC creations in the I LOVE CUDDLE FABRIC! Facebook group so we can see what kind of beautiful things you make with Cuddle® fabric! I’ll be around cheering you on!