Sunday, December 19, 2021

Island Batik Ambassador's English Paper Piecing Challenge

Island Batik Ambassador's English Paper Piecing Challenge.  I have an EPP project I've been working on with Island Batik fabrics for two years, but it's nowhere close to done.  So what to do?

Then I remembered an EPP kit I bought in Houston a few years ago.  It's called Georgia and is by Courtney Reed.  



This is a fun pattern with lots of interesting shapes.  I went digging in my Island Batik stash and found this fun orange fabric for the big arcs.  Then I picked the rest of the fabrics to coordinate.  Below you can see that to EPP curves you use tape to hold the piece in place while you are sewing.

The pattern recommends sewing the finished pieces to a background around the edge using invisible thread.  I decided to hand sew mine down instead.  I then layered the quilt with some Hobbs fusible batting as I had a scrap piece just the right size!  It was slick because the quilt was so small and because then I didn't have pins in the way when I was marking some lines prior to quilting.

TA DA!  I love how this turned out.  It would be fun to make a quilt with a whole set of them sometime.  


Since the quilt was very symmetrical I had a lot of fun designing the quilting  I started by drawing some registration lines with iron erase marker.  


I started thee quilting by making this big star and then adding matchstick quilting around the outside.


I decided to echo the clamshell shape in outward lines and then filled them with two different patterns.  The echoes were created to add interest and to make sure that you could see the clamshell shape.


I love when the right light comes in to catch beautiful pictures of quilting!


For the background areas I added lots of pebbles.  They do take a little longer to quilt, but they add a totally different texture which I like.



I couldn't resist doing radiating rays inside those little half circles.  I also like how it looks like it extends from the middle.


Project complete!  Sew pretty.  Now where to hang it up?!


I hope you get to quilt today!
Suzy