Rosettes for Stonefields Quilt Border + Ongoing Experiments with English Paper Piecing

Happy Slow Stitching Sunday!  You guys, I have finally been sewing again for the first time since moving back to North Carolina!  I had so much fun making the tiny 3/8" hexie rosettes for Stonefields Quilt blocks #14 & 15 back in September, so I decided that making a few of the 168 larger 3/4" hexie rosettes that I will need for my border might be a good task to ease myself out of my stitching slump.  It turned out to be the perfect choice.  As Tula Pink says, you have to eat your elephant one little bite at a time.

3 Rosettes Completed, 165 More Needed for Stonefields Quilt Border

I would have finished more than three of these, but I spent about two hours ransacking my studio closets, bins and drawers searching for my All Points Patchwork: English Paper Piecing Beyond the Hexagon... book by Diane Gilleland.  (This post contains affiliate links).  To my supreme irritation, I never did find it.  I was also unable to locate my little black and gold pack of John James size 12 Milliners needles, even though I swear I remember finding them mixed in with unrelated supplies when I was unpacking.  Where, oh where did I put those needles?  Before I moved, I could put my hands on just about any book, tool or notion in less than 5 minutes.  A place for everything and everything in its place and all that.  Well, I caved and ordered more needles on Amazon, but I did not buy another copy of the book as it's sure to turn up sooner or later.

My Stonefields Quilt (pattern by Susan Smith is getting harder to find, but there is still one copy available on Etsy here) was purchased from a quilt shop and came kitted with the necessary EPP template papers for 3/4" hexagons.  I can't remember whether this nifty windowed acrylic template for fussy cutting came with the kit as well, or if I purchased it separately from Paper Pieces.  For hexies that I wanted to cut from stripes or centering specific printed motifs from my fabric, I traced around the template with a mechanical pencil and sandpaper beneath the fabric, then cut the hexies out individually with scissors.

Tracing Acrylic Template Prior to Cutting Hexies With Scissors

These flowers from my Tilda fabric were cut in the same way, centering the template window on the flowers and tracing around them one by one with pencil, then cutting out each shape with scissors.  So much fun!  But OH SO SLOW...

More Fussy Cutting With Window Template

There was a silver lining to the chaos in my studio and the missing EPP book, because after wasting two hours looking for things I never found, I wasted invested a couple more hours going down a rabbit hole of YouTube English Paper Piecing tutorials, trying to find the method I used successfully for the smaller hexie rosettes I made four months ago.  Remember that I am an EPP newbie, and making two of something is not enough repetition to ingrain everything indelibly in my brain.  

Sorry, (Not Sorry), This Is NOT a Nine Patch Variation

If you've signed up to receive the email newsletter from the International Quilt Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, you were treated to a photo of this glorious Civil War era antique quilt by an unknown maker yesterday:

93.5 x 85.5 Quilt From IQM Collection, circa 1860-1880

Look at the masterful color and value placement and deployment of design principles in this quilt that was created by someone who definitely did not have a "design wall" and probably didn't have any formal art training, either.  I love how those two opposite L-shaped brackets of darker blocks and the dark brown blocks surrounding the blue ones in the center create framing and structure similar to a medallion quilt for a one-block quilt that could have been dizzyingly busy with a random block placement.  I love how the strips of pink blocks do the same thing, but with more subtlety.  I love the glimmer of the teal center patches and the one block with the bright blue.  I was immediately captivated by this quilt, but scratched my head by its designation by the museum as a "Nine Patch Variation" and the newsletter description stating that this quilt contained "small diamonds" in addition to squares, rectangles and triangle patches.