Whilst I am predominately an EPPer and Slow Stitcher, I consider myself to be a multi crafter and maker.
I enjoy many different crafts such as crochet, knitting, embroidery, and art pursuits such as painting, drawing and colouring in.
When I was younger, I loved to draw, and my first craft was quilling and card making. I also remember making heaps of origami boxes from old birthday and Christmas cards. There was also a phase of tissue paper decoupage, where you tear tiny bits of pretty tissue paper and glue it on to paper Mache statues and kraft boxes.
From about the age of maybe 10 to 13 Mum and I started to visit craft shows. In the early days it was the Stitches and Craft show, held once a year at Rosehill Racecourse. This show was massive and had retailers from across the country selling all kinds of different crafts from stamping (another thing I did), card making, beading, sewing, cross stitch, quilling, patchwork and so many more. It would become a yearly tradition for Mum and I to attend, always going home with lots of fun new gadgets and kits to make and play with.
After my foray in to paper crafts, I was ready to have a play with needle and thread, the first incarnation being cross stitch. I didn’t take to cross stitch very well, and started many things that were never completed. I tried a bit of long stitch and actually managed to finish something, a piece that had a horse head in it. There was also a brief foray in to latch hook. It was around this time that Mum first taught me to crochet. I begin by making small flowers and granny squares, and off course I had the obligatory Knitting Nancy and spent many hours making long skinny wool snakes.
Through my adolescent years crafts kind of fell by the wayside, with drawing and art taking precedence, and I would spend ours making collages in my diary from images torn from magazines. Upon leaving school and beginning my design diploma I got into quilt making and then discovered EPP.
Some of my crochet makes. I still enjoy crochet now and then and have also learnt to knit in the past few years.
Discovering EPP was like a siren calling. I can still remember the exact moment I first laid eyes on a scrappy hexagon quilt…it’s one of those few memories that stand out in crystal clear detail, such are those that become a formative part of your life.
Mum and I were visiting a local quilt show and I want to say I was around 19 or 20 years old. We walked up and down the rows, looking at all the quilts. My Mum had started quilt making (incidentally Mum is also a very talented multi-crafter and is well skilled in cross stitch, embroidery, quilt making, EPP, crochet and knitting) and so this was not the first quilt show we had attended. Straight away I was first attracted by all of the pretty fabrics you could get, and I was particularly drawn to 1930’s reproduction and vintage floral feel fabrics.
I had begun making my first quilt, a sort of queen size quilt, made up of large panels with each panel having hand cut and appliqued circles of different sizes in rainbow order. The back was made up of pieced squares and I hand quilted the entire thing in cross hatch lines around an inch a part – no starting small for me!
Coming to the end of a row at the quilt show, there draped over something, a chair maybe, was an unfinished, scrappy 1″ hexagon quilt. I stopped and stood in wonder. What was this! How had someone sewn all of those hexies together! Look at all the wonderful fabrics, it’s so delightfully scrappy and whimsical. I asked my Mum how it had been made and she said it was English Paper Piecing, a method where you cut fabric, wrap it around a paper template and hand sew it all together. Well, I needed to try it and try it right now!
We found ourselves some 1″ hexagon paper templates and straight away I got to cutting up the left over fabrics from my first quilt in to hundreds of hexagons. Mum showed me how to baste them, back then we didn’t know any better and thread basted right through the paper. Then Mum showed me how to do a whip stitch and I begun stitching my hexies together using regular old cotton, and yes when I first started you could see my stitches on the front.
From it’s very beginning, working on my 1″ hexie quilt brought me comfort and joy. I could spend ours sitting and cutting, basting and stitching hexies together without a care in the world, lost in the moment and my own thoughts. That scrappy hexie quilt is still unfinished and has been a whip for around 22 years now! It’s my time capsule quilt and I’m in no real hurry to finish it. So much of my life and memories have been stitched into it, so many emotions, making it super special. If I’m honest I almost don’t want to finish it, it’s such a comfort to me to work on, especially if I’m having a particular rough time.
My One inch scrappy hexie quilt
Not long after discovering EPP, Mum and I were at another show, the big Sydney Craft and Quilt Fair, where on display I saw a mini quilt of a tree of life that had 1/4 inch hexie flowers. Once again I was completely awestruck and just knew I had to give these tiny hexies a try for myself. We found some packets and I started making myself little quarter inch flowers. Once I had amassed quite a few I begun stitching them together into to what would become a mini quilt called Garden of Patience. I have since completed a total of four Garden of Patience mini quilts.
Once I started down the tiny EPP road, there was no stopping me, and certainly no going back! I begun making up my own little designs, stumbled on the idea for hexie hearts and begun experimenting with other shapes in the EPP tool kit.
It was clear that I had found my ‘craft calling’. I could not stop stitching fabric covered paper shapes together, but most importantly, I didn’t want to stop. I could never have known back then that discovering this craft would have such an impact on my life. I am so grateful to whoever it was that made that 1″ scrappy hexie quilt and put it in my local quilt show all those years ago.
Left to right, top to bottom – Garden of Patience # 4, Garden of Patience # 3, Garden of Patience #1 with my 1″ hexie quilt, and Garden of Patience #1 in all her glory. In number one there are a total of 1004 1/4″ hexies, making up 129 flowers. When I made the second version I took note of how long it took to stitch, an eye boggling 186.5 hours!
Some of my other EPP projects, old and recent.
In recent years embroidery and slow stitching has become a major contributor to how I spend my time creatively. I love to collect a variety of pretty threads in different colours, weights, solid or variegated, wool, silk and cotton. I follow so many incredible embroidery artists and I enjoy the many different styles of embroidery there is.
I don’t work on my embroidery projects very often, but have a long list of things I want to make. I even have a desire to get back in to some cross stitch!
Some of my embroidery projects.
A turning point for me in my creativity, was discovering the practice of being a textile artist. This has been largely influenced and inspired by the incredible Fleur Woods, whose online course Joyful Embroidery I took back in 2023 and have raved about on here before (click HERE to read my interview with Fleur).
Now my stitching can consist of anything from just EPP, whether I’m working on a quilt, wall hanging, or small project, to embroidery, embroidery and EPP together, slow stitching, fabric collage, or just mixing all of them up together!
I hope you have enjoyed my story as a multi crafter. I love that as a creative we get to grow and evolve in our practice. I am definitely not the same crafter I was as a child, as a teenager, or as a young adult, and I suspect I will be a different crafter in the years to come.
The one constant that I think will remain is that I will continue to find joy in the things that I make, whether they be with hook or needle, thread or yarn, paper or fabric.
Happy Stitching and Making Friends,
Miss Leela x