Originally Posted by Helenq
Originally Posted by ccthomas
If you were not traveling, could you have used this technique with a sewing machine?
Originally Posted by SandyinZ4
Originally Posted by My time
What beautiful quilts! Okay now I know this may seem like a dumb question but what is the difference between Epp and for lack of a better term, regular paper piecing?
There are no dumb questions on this board. That is how you learn. :-) Here is my explanation. For example, the quilts here were made with a small several sided piece. You cut out a paper in that exact shape, lay it over the small fabric which is just a bit larger, take a running stitch around the fabric and cinch it up around the paper piece that is inside after gathering up. After doing several of these, you take two and lay RST (right sides together) and then join on one of the edges with a whip stitch. After you have joined several, you can then remove the center paper templates which are not attached in any way. You alays leave the outside templates in placeuntil you have finished the edge.
On regular paper piecing, you have a design on a piece of paper with various numbers and lines as to where each piece of fabric needs to be sewn. After you have sewn all the pices in their right places, you turn over the piece and begin to remove all of the paper. Hope that helps a little bit.
I wanted to speed up the process of basting the fabric. So I set my machine to a wide basting stitch and ran all the pieces threw the sewing machine. After ALL the pieces were whip stitched (by hand), and I was ready to put the 3 layers together, I removed the basting stitch. That was the only part other than the quilting (after the papers were removed) did I us a machine. I had seen some information on the web where people used a very small zig-zag stitch. But I did not care for the look of that plus I thought that removing the papers would be a bit difficult.
Here are some photos of how I machine basted 2 projects that I am working on now. They both will be purses--one large and one smaller.