Suzie's Armoire: filled with charms: English Paper Piecing--Done!

I started out the month of January with the goal of learning how to English Paper Piece (EPP) and to complete a hexie flower for my Instagram friend, Heidee. Goal met! But not without some detours along the way.

I read a bunch of tutorials and watched some videos before starting on this project. After figuring I had the basics down, and wanting to start right away, I grabbed some scraps from my IG Mini Quilt and got to work. Above is a work-in-progress photo of my practice flower. As you can see, I decided to try mixing colors, since I was trying to use up some scraps in the process.

Then I got this idea of using up some black cardstock that I had leftover from a school project. That meant tracing the hexagon shapes using a white colored pencil. Worked well enough.

So I set about making a flower using some fabric I rediscovered from an earlier project. (Side note: most of my stash, I will admit, is 10-15 years old or more. I've been working on this "quilting thing" for almost 20 years. But with a big break from it over the past 5 years or so. Which means I don't have a lot of "modern" fabrics. Sorry, folks, that's just the truth. And in an effort to "sew my stash," expect lots of projects using what are nearly vintage fabrics at this point.)

While I really like this fabric, and finished it long before the month was over, I just wasn't crazy about the end-result. Someone had suggested glue-basting, and I think I used too much glue, and didn't like the way it turned out on the back. Plus the black cardstock kind of stuck to the fabric and I was afraid it might show through. (Maybe not such a good idea to use the black cardstock after all.) I'm also not crazy about my hand-printing abilities, which means I obsessed over writing my name and location on the center hexagon. Like really obsessed over it, and probably made two dozen attempts before settling and just going with what I had.

I really wanted to give fussy-cutting a try, so I went back to my stash, and grabbed one of my earliest quilting fabric purchases. I should have taken a photo of the whole fabric so you could see where I took my hexagons from. Anyway, much happier with this one, and I honestly just finished stitching it up this afternoon. Nothing like waiting until the last minute!

And a picture of the back. Complete with black cardstock. I punched holes in them to make them easier to remove. And didn't use glue this time around. I think I basted too close to the fold, but it should be okay. I hope!