Last week was the first meeting of the Montreal Modern Quilt Guild since our summer break. It was great to see some people come back from the few meetings we had before and also to meet new faces. In June, four of us had started a scrap swap. We had to bring a sandwich Ziploc filled with scraps from our stash. We had to pick someone else’s bag, make a little quilted project during the summer and give it to the bag owner at our first fall meeting.

The main fabric in the bag that I picked was a white fabric featuring flower prints that looked like watercolor reproductions. In the bag, there was a few solid color and dot print fabrics from the same collection and some other scraps. When thinking of what I would be doing, my main concern was to feature these watercolor flowers. Also, since it was a small project I thought it was a great occasion to try something new. I decided to go for an English Paper Piecing project. It was perfect since at the time I started doing it, I was going on vacation.

I decided on a mug rug. I did my own design to have a central hexagon that would be the right size to feature  a flower and small diamonds that would fit one of the dot prints. I printed it out my template on a 8.5″ X 11″ freezer paper sheet from C. Jenkins. The template takes all the sheet space. So, my mug rug ended up being 9″ x 11.5″ (I used 1/4″ seam allowance when cutting each fabric piece). I ironed my template on a second sheet of freezer paper to have ticker paper pieces. Then I cut each piece out of the template. To cut fabric for each pieces, I ironed the paper piece on the wrong side of the fabric and cut about 1/4″ outside of it. This was great for fussy cutting  as the paper was sticking to the fabric.

Then I went on, basted each pieces and then hand-stitched them together. Rachel Hauser from Stitched in Color as a great introductory video to English Paper Piecing. You will find it in this tutorial from her if you want to know more about it. It was very helpful to me.

 

If you would like to use my template to make a project of your own, you can find it here. On the second page you’ll find the template for a complete hexagon if you would like to make a project larger than a mug rug. If you do use it I would love to see what you come up with, so please add a picture to my flickr group.

And here is what I did for the back of the mug rug. It is also featuring another piece of the main fabric.