Fiesta Gitana Quilt - English Paper Piecing Tips!

Fiesta Gitana is the cover quilt from the Millefiori Quilts book 4 by Willyne Hammerstein. Certainly not for the faint hearted, this is a pattern for those English Paper Piecer's who have a lot of practice under their belt and love a challenge! At Sew & Quilt, we have created English Paper Pieces to make the quilt, along with matching acrylic templates with a 3/8" added seam allowance to cut out your fabrics and fussy-cut to your hearts desire!

Truth time, I found it tough to begin, unpicking many seams when they weren't lining up and looked miles out!? Then checking that the templates were the right size, checking my basting was tight, not tight enough? As I was sewing more of the shapes together, I realised the slightest millimetre can throw off the next shape and then you can look a mile off where needed, then joining to the sharply pointed kites made it even more noticeable. After some practice and testing out the joining sequence in a couple of different ways, I landed on a way that resulted in neater joins. So I thought it was a must to share with you all incase you fancied having a go too. Please see below the link to click on and download the block assembly guide.

English Paper Piecing Tips

The most important tip is to manipulate your templates to where they need to be. Do this by pulling your fabric basted pieces in the exact position it needs to finish when sewing a new shape onto a previous one. Also make sure to start sewing at the correct starting point, flip the shapes so you look at them from the front side and see how they look, be careful to keep this position and use a Clover Wonder Clip to keep them secure if needed. 

If you've sewn a shape from the starting point slightly off where it should have been sometimes you will have to unpick and start that seam line again as it could throw off the next piece etc. Now you understand why I said this was a challenge! :-D

Download the block assembly for English Paper Piecing the Fiesta Gitana Quilt Pattern here. Do let me know if it proves useful for you, the same tips can be applied for other tricky EPP quilts too. Happy sewing! Links for products below.

Please note you will need a copy of the Millefiori Quilts book 4 to make the quilt, my block construction is simply to help with EPP methods only, full copyright belongs to Quiltmania the book publisher.

Please find a link to the supplies below;

Fiesta Gitana English Paper Pieces

Fiesta Gitana Acrylic Templates

Fabrics used; Selection of Liberty Fabrics for the stars, Art Gallery Fabrics Pure Elements Golden Bronze for background.