Modifying Two Traditional EPP Designs

My fascination with English paper piecing (EPP) continues. After doing some sewing and research, I’ve come up with two projects I want to make, both inspired by traditional designs. I ordered nearly 3,000 EPP papers and was expecting a huge package. Silly me. When your EPP papers are for 1-inch shapes, they do not take up much space at all.

After experimenting with my basted hexagons, I wanted to get back to sewing. Instead of taking time to come up with a carefully planned design that would require organized assembly, I started making flowers. It was easy to put together sets of seven hexagons to make each flower, and then I had units I could lay out to make a modified Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt. Traditionally made entirely of hexagons, the green “paths” are too wide for my tastes. So I’m replacing the path hexagons with diamonds and triangles, which I envision as leaves. It will make the flowers more prominent, while giving them a visual edge, and it will also allow me to keep working in a piecemeal and unplanned way to build this quilt.

My modified Grandmother’s Flower Garden design (which I’m sure other people have made with other names)

I also want to make a scrap quilt inspired by traditional postage stamp quilts. They were made using one-inch squares with no two fabrics alike. It’s the no-repeated-fabric part that really intrigues me (I am a total sucker for scrap quilts). But I felt like a plain grid wasn’t very interesting, and that piecing all those squares by hand would be boring.

Then I saw Jodi Godfrey’s scrap quilts in Flossie Teacake’s Guide to English Paper Piecing by Florence Knapp and got excited. One of her quilts was made with hexagons surrounded by staggered half-hexagons to make a log cabin variation Godfrey calls mistletoe in her kits and patterns. I realized I could apply the no-repeating-fabric idea to this pattern and get a really intriguing scrap quilt, so I ordered the papers to make one.

Jodi Godfrey’s mistletoe quilt (along with her super cute dog)

While 2,850 sounds like lots of papers, I’m not sure it will be enough. Bed-sized quilts take a lot of “1-inch” pieces. But it felt like enough to keep me busy for a while.