Exciting news! We’ve been working with Anna Maria Horner and Free Spirit Fabrics to bring you the paper pieces for Anna Maria’s stunning new Quilt Pattern, English Summer!

The quilt is a beautiful medallion design that mixes EPP, applique and machine piecing. It’s a perfect quilt for dipping your toes into hand stitching, and still getting a big quilt.

Anna Maria’s new collection, a part of her new Conservatory Fabrics line, has lots of prints that are just made for fussy cutting! The print below, Preening, allows you to get a whole bunch of repeats from a small area. If you’ve been afraid of fussy cutting because of the waste, look out for designs like this one which won’t turn into swiss cheese while cutting your pieces.

I mark where I want to cut my repeat on my templates with a whiteboard marker, so that I can accurately place the template over the same section of the design over and over. If you look closely at the print below, you can see that I drew around the acrylic template with a ball point pen. I repeated this 6 times total and then cut around the lines with scissors.

Even when I’m appliqueing these days, I still use glue to baste my shapes. If you thread baste without going through the cardboard, you can pop the shapes out afterwards and keep the threads in, but I find thread basting slow and awkward after so many years with my glue stick, so I stick with this! The glue basting is enough to fold the fabric into the right shape, so the fabric will ‘remember’ the crease even after you’ve removed the papers.

Once I basted all my shapes, I held them right sides together and whipstitched through the folds.

After I finished my little jewel star, one of the corner blocks for the quilt, I just couldn’t help continuing! I wanted to play more with these pretty flowers! The jewel tones in this collection are just delicious!

The English Summer EPP kit can now be purchased in the shop!