An English paper pieced quilt

Some of you have been eagerly awaiting pictures of the finished baby quilt I have made for my beautiful cousin and her first baby who we are all patiently awaiting the arrival of. Well, today was her baby shower so I can now share those pictures with you.

It's been a labour of love, with all the 2 and 1/2 inch hexagons being hand cut, hand basted around the paper templates and then hand stitched together - the English paper piecing method. Incidentally, I hand cut all the individual paper hexagons out too so it has certainly taken some time. I certainly think it was worth it though.

I bought the material back in February, not long after finding out my cousin was expecting. I fell in love with it and just knew it was the right colour palette - suitable for either gender and so soft and peaceful. Bambi is such a gorgeous film with wonderful characters and the 'sweet dreams' message just seemed perfect.



I had a good old look on Pinterest and Instagram for inspiration before deciding on the type of project I was going to make although I was fairly certain I was going to go with a quilt of some description. I'd only tried one other English paper piecing (EPP) project before which was pretty small, so I decided that I'd give a bigger project a go as I had the time before the baby was due. So off I went, printing off and cutting out paper templates and cutting out the fabric hexagons - it was only afterwards that I discovered 'fussy cutting' and there's a part of me that wishes I had known about it before, but I still love how the quilt has turned out. Perhaps I'll do that somewhere down the line.

Then it was time for 'basting' all the fabric hexagons around the paper templates, allowing for a clean edge to hand sew together. I thread basted rather than glued - it worked well and used up some old thread that I didn't have a use for or that I got cheaply as I knew I would be removing it once all the hexagons were stitched together.

Copious amounts of tea were drunk at this point 😂

Followers of my Instagram and Facebook page will have seen a number of progress photos where I was hand stitching each of the hexagons together, but these stopped as I got nearer to completing as (barring the hubby and the kids who share the dining room where I was making the quilt) I wanted my cousin to be the first to see her finished quilt. 

The hubby was fitting some worktop in the kitchen whilst I
was stitching - I don't typically use a saw when I'm sewing 😂

But I don't believe I shared my planned layout:

Once the hexagons were all stitched together, I popped to one of my local fabric shops with the completed quilt top,and selected a gorgeous pale grey cotton fabric for the backing and border of the quilt top - I didn't want to lose any of the pattern from the hexagons. I machine stitched the quilt top to the borders and removed all the thread I had used for basting (what a time consuming job THAT was!).

Reverse of the completed quilt top with
borders prior to adding wadding and
backing fabric

Once the quilt top was completed, I cut out and added some wadding and the backing fabric before sewing together using the same technique you would use for completing a mug rug - cheating perhaps and not traditional quilting style, but I am yet to perfect the art of adding bias binding and I wanted the quilt to look beautifully finished as I had spent so long completing it.

Once that was done, I machine quilted and voila, one completed new baby quilt...

With my cousins permission, here she is opening her gift:

I hope you have enjoyed today's blog post and agree that the quilt has turned out fantastically.

Until next time,

M x