#scrapproject

I really enjoy EPP, English Paper Piecing. It is a patchwork method where you use small paper shapes as a base to baste your fabric around, and then you whipstitch the shapes together. Once a piece is sewn on all sides, the paper shape can be removed (and often reused a few times). It is all done by hand, and it is very easy to get nice even shapes (as long as your paper pieces are all nice and even).

Both of these projects are made with hexagons, the pillowcase has hexies where each side is 2 cm, the purse has hexies with 1 cm sides. Both are made from scrap fabric, another reason I love EPP, it is an easy way to use up small fabric scraps. And because you don't need to iron much while sewing, only right after basting and once everything is sewn together, it is also very portable. I just need to trow my hexies, needles, thread and thimble in a little tin and I am ready to go.

Oh, also a picture of the pillowcase in use:

I made this tie-on pocket for my friend.

I drafted the pattern myself, based roughly on the shape of tie on pockets that I saw online. It is quite big, about 30 cm high, so plenty of room for phones and wallets.

I enjoy crazy quilting, and both me and my friend have a love for history. Crazy quilting of this style was very popular in the nineteenth century, it was a way to use up all kinds of fabric scraps. I used muslin as the base, and used all kinds of scraps. Off cuts from garment making, pieces of old clothes, small bits of quilting fabric, remnants of ribbon etc. My friend is blind, so along with different colours, I also focused heavily on different textures. There is cotton, wool, felt, metalic and silky ribbon, fleece, flannel and aida. The red beads spell her name in braille.

Crazy quilting by hand is done by appliqueing pieces of fabric onto a base fabric, after which the seams are embroidered over. Some quilters used all kinds of stitches, in this case I chose to use one single stitch. Most pieces have their edges turned under while appliqueing them, but for the fabrics that don't fray like felt and fleece I didn't bother.

I usually start in the middle of my piece with a single scrap of fabric, and work outwards from there, making up the design as I go.

The below pictures are the front and back of a crazy quilted lavender sachet I made for my grandma. Here you can see that I did choose to use different embroidery stitches for each seam.

In this case, I picked my fabric scraps to give a christmassy vibe, and went with gold embroidery to match that.

This is one of my favourite scrap projects ever. It consists of so many different yarns, all in approximately the same weight (or doubled or tripled to make it the same weight), and knit in stripes.

The inspiration for this project came from the fuzzy black yarn that is between each coloured stripe. That was a ball of yarn I got from my grandma, believing it to be a reasonably sized amount of yarn. Which it was, but it was clear that some little kid (perhaps even myself, I don't remember) had had some fun cutting the yarn in pieces. Someone, presumably my grandma, had just wound all the pieces back into one ball to deal with later. So I wound each piece into its own little ball, and saw that I had about the same amount of those little balls as I had of small scraps, and decided to make something stripy with black stripes in between the coloured stripes.

The bag is knitted in the round, with tunnels for the leather straps at the top, and yarn overs at the bottom for the eyelets. Those eyelets are heavily reinforced with whipstitches. The bag is lined with the cutest fabric ever as you can see.