English Paper Piecing and Football

Yesterday was another long football game, but I was prepared with a small sewing kit and EPP supplies.

I had never heard of this technique until I saw it popping up around the blogosphere. It seems to be making a bit of a resurgence! After going completely stir crazy during last week's 3.5 hour game, I knew I wanted to give EPP a shot.  I spent all week trolling the web trying to decide what design/pattern I wanted to try. I really wanted to make Tonya's candied hexies, but they were frankly too intimidating. Christina is also doing a "sprocket" quilt-along, but those center hexagons look too big to be easily portable. However, Christina's blog linked over to a 60˚Diamond quilt-along led by Jessica, and I decided this was a perfect started project. Only one shape to cut, and infinite design possibilities.

My next step was to toy with design ideas. First I battled with photoshop for quite some time in order to get this nice blank template ready.

Then it was time to play! Below are all of the different iterations I tested out.

First: your standard colored stars on a white background

White stars on a colored background! Or perhaps white/off-white in tandem?

My boyfriend came up with this one. I think it looks weird.

hexgon flowers.

Colored stars on a white background but spaced out more

Went back to the first idea and tried out variegated stars...a little too busy.

An idea for yellow stars on a blue background, but it doesn't look that great.

This was my boyfriend's idea. He really wanted to incorporate white. However, I pointed out to him that using white would require me going out any buying white fabric instead of just working with scraps.

We filled in all of the whites for variegated stars. This was the winner!

 So the winning design is nice because each star can stand-alone, which makes it easy to use scraps for this project. Plus I don't have to worry too much about whether one star's scheme fits with the other stars, at least until I start sewing it all together.

Next step was the prep-work. I picked out three fabrics I liked for the first hexagon and started cutting out diamonds. Or attempting to. I knew I needed to cut a 2.5" strip, but then I was trying to cut it up along to 60˚ line in 2.5" increments, which led to parallelograms instead of diamonds.

This is not a diamond.

Whoops! This was one of those days when quilting reminds me of the importance of math in the real world. But instead of trying to calculate how big I needed to cut it, I just read the cutting instructions on Christina's blog, which told me I was supposed to be slicing it in 3" increments instead of 2.5".

Here is my planned design for the first hexagon:

My next step was to starch the heck out of all of these pieces. This way I could just fold them over the paper without having to iron the seam allowance down or anything.

Everybody drying out from their starching.

I then decided that I wanted to try out some of these techniques at home before football, while I still had a computer in front of me to look to for help. I mainly followed all of Christina's great tutorials about how she stitches. I used her method of basting along the back instead of piercing the paper. Christina also doesn't bother with knots in the basting stage, which makes it very quick and easy.

 Above I'm doing my first basting. I took waaaay too many stitches. The paper clips were great for holding things together, but I had to be careful not to push them too far down or their little ends would get caught under the seam allowance and they would be a pain to get off.

 Here's the first on all basted. I didn't turn the ends right because they both ended up facing the same way.

Okay, then it was time to try stitching pieces together. Here I am trying the ladder stitch that Christina uses, right sides together.

You can see below that the stitching is somewhat visible. I wasn't completely pleased.

So then I tried a whipstich, which is the standard.

 You can still see the stitches but at least they are more consistently visible and they are more subtle.

 I then re-read Christina's blog and realized that she recommends trying the ladder stitch with wrong sides together. I gave this a shot at football.

 That series of photos was mainly to prove that I really did do this at football. :) Doing the ladder stitch wrong sides together definitely hid all of my stitches.  Here is a zoom of the above photo to show my seams. The left side is ladder stitch, the right is whipstitch.

Now the ladder stitch did lead to a slight and subtle rippling, but in general looks really good.  Here is my challenge though (and I would appreciate advice):

By putting wrong sides together, the ends stick out while I am trying to stitch. I show an example below where I am trying to put together the two halves of my star. I can tuck them down (second photo below), but then I get a big bulge, and my stitching in those areas where I go over the bulge has looked noticeably different from the top. I need to find out how Christina handles this issue. Anyways, any tips on how to get over the bulge are appreciated. I may just have to go back to right sides together if I can't figure it out.

Anyways, I brought all of my little pre-cut supplies to football in a small zipper pouch. I had it on my lap and would stitch during the 75% of time that nothing was going on, and would pause and watch when things were actually happening. It was very easy to stay organized and especially for the basting portion, precision was not required, which made it easy to do while only partially paying attention to my sewing.

This was a game where pretty much everybody left the stadium at the start of the fourth quarter because we were so far ahead, but we stayed until the bitter end and I am proud to say that it was through my sewing that I was able to last that long. :)

Side note: I have a couple of spools of this gutermann thread that isn't very good. It just snaps if you tug on it. It's 100% viscose (what the heck is viscose??) so I guess I need to avoid buying it again. I really wish I knew more about threads. I try to buy cotton but it turns out almost everything I own is polyester. In the end I usually just pick spools in whatever color I want and don't look at the thread type. But here it seems I clearly got the wrong thread type...

darn thing just snapped!

Odds 'N Ends

No quilty updates right now, but two questions/requests for advice:

1) I have a lot of cute socks.  Unfortunately I have about 10 pairs that have holes in them and really need to be tossed. But I feel so horrible doing so! I really hate throwing ANYTHING in the trash, especially something made out of fabric.  Does anyone know of any projects I could do with repurposed socks? They really are cute, but they are also all worn down.  It may be a lost cause. :(

2) Football season has started. I am not a fan of football.  I have season tickets. I enjoy the spectacle, the team spirit, and watching the marching band since I used to be a member. But Friday's game lasted a full 3.5 hours. I just can't sit still that long! I am thinking of finding a small, portable sewing project to bring along to work on during games so I don't go crazy. Knitting would be perfect but I'm really bad at it and don't really want to mail all of my yarns down from Alaska and start on a whole separate hobby from quilting right now.  I have read lots on many people's blogs about english paper piecing.  It seems to be relatively portable.  Thoughts? Is this something I could manage at football? Any other ideas for small projects I could do?

Finally, I wanted to share a little story.  I was visiting relatives this weekend and we went to a small, old-timey tourist town (population <3000).  I was very excited to see a quilt shop on the main street (only street), but when we went in, the entire place was just selling finished quilts! There was a teeny tiny section in the back with fabric and a few patterns.  I was so disappointed I spent probably less than 5 minutes in the shop. Have you ever seen a place like this? It highlighted to me that the town was really aimed at tourists since the quilt shop was trying to sell completed quilts to people (and they had TONS in there, these weren't art quilts but more mass-produced traditional patchwork designs) who might be wanting a piece of Americana or something. Anyways, I was pretty dismayed over it, although I should have checked out the prices on the quilts before I stormed out just to see what they were going for!
I'm not big on selling quilts. It just takes so much time and materials to make one, I have trouble thinking of a price that anyone would pay that would actually make it worth my time to make a quilt to sell.  Think of the cost of supplies, plus the price per hour that you've spent on it.  It adds up very quickly! Plus if you're making a bunch of quilts to sell, you are probably doing it so fast that it's no longer fun. Leah Day had a nice post about this in her "Business of Quilting" series (or it was called something along those lines). Anyways, visiting the shop certainly brought up a lot of food for thought!

Okay, that's all for now. I'm quilting my clock while waiting for the new clock hands to come in the mail.  I plan on finishing it before the end of the week!