There is a category of quilting that does not need a sewing machine, does not need a cutting table, and does not need an uninterrupted afternoon. You can do it in a waiting room. You can do it in a car while someone else is at an appointment. You can do it on a sofa with the television on and still get somewhere.
English paper piecing is that category, and it has been outlasting every other trend in quilting for a very long time. The oldest dated piece in the International Quilt Museum's collection is a hexagon mosaic from 1796, made from single hexagon rosettes in cottons of the 1790s.
The idea is simple enough to explain in one sentence. You wrap a piece of fabric around a paper shape, you hold it there while you sew that shape to its neighbors by hand, and when the shape is surrounded on every side you take the paper out. The paper is scaffolding. It holds an exact edge while you stitch, and then it leaves.
What follows is the whole technique, start to finish: what to buy, what to make yourself, the two ways of basting and why quilters disagree about them, the stitch that joins the pieces, the seam that frightens people on a machine and does not frighten anyone by hand, when the papers come out, and what to make first.
The video below, from GourmetQuilter, shows the preparation and the joining at normal speed, which is worth watching once before you read on. The steps go by quickly on screen, though, and the small decisions inside them are easier to hold onto in writing.
What English paper piecing is
English paper piecing is often one of the first techniques a beginner learns, and it is one of the few that a beginner can learn completely. There is no hidden second level. When you can baste a shape and whip stitch two shapes together, you can make anything in the technique. The rest is design.
The Victoria and Albert Museum, which calls it piecing over paper, describes it as the most enduring patchwork method in Britain: the pattern is drawn onto paper and accurately cut, small pieces of fabric are folded around each paper shape and held in place, and the shapes are joined from the back with small whipstitches. The templates are usually thick paper, cardstock or freezer paper. Fabric is wrapped around each template and held in place, either with basting stitches or with glue. The fabric shapes are then sewn together by hand, almost always with a whip stitch, and the papers come out afterward.
The reason it survives is accuracy. A folded edge over a stiff paper is a straight, exact edge, and two exact edges butt together perfectly. That is why the technique handles shapes that machine piecing finds awkward: hexagons, sixty degree diamonds, anything where three seams meet at a point. The paper does the work that a quarter inch seam allowance does on a machine, and it does it more reliably, because you can see it.
The reason it stays popular is the other half. It is portable. Everything you need fits in a small bag: papers, fabric scraps, a needle, thread, small scissors. There is no setup and no cleanup, which means it can absorb the fifteen minute pockets of a week that nothing else can use.
English paper piecing is not foundation paper piecing
These two get confused constantly, and the names are almost the only thing they share. Karen Brown of Just Get it Done Quilts puts the distinction plainly, and it is worth learning before you buy anything.
English paper piecing, EPP, is hand sewing. You use card stock, the fabric wraps around the outside of the shape, and the design is usually a center with symmetrical shapes arranged around it. The paper is removed at the end and can be used again.
Foundation paper piecing, FPP, is machine sewing. You use thin newsprint, the fabric sits on top of the paper, and you sew along printed lines, flipping and pressing each piece as you go. It is built around angles, and the paper is torn away and thrown out.
Different tools, different motion, different results. If you buy foundation papers for an EPP project you will have bought the wrong thing.
What you need to start english paper piecing
This is one of the cheapest ways into quilting, because most of it is already in the house.
Papers. Card stock, in the shape and size you want. Buy them pre-cut, print and cut your own, or punch them.
Fabric. Scraps. This is the technique scraps were waiting for. If you are new to it, use one hundred percent cotton, because cotton creases well and holds a fold. Fabrics that spring back will fight you at every corner.
A needle. For basting, whatever sharp needle you have. For joining, a thin one. Karen Brown uses a size 10 milliner's needle, which is a little longer than a standard sharp and easier to control through a tiny stitch. A set of hand sewing needles in mixed sizes is the sensible way to find out which one suits your hand, because this is a personal thing and nobody can tell you the answer.
Thread. For basting, whatever is left on a bobbin or the end of a spool. The color does not matter and it is coming out again. For joining, it matters. The Quilter's Bible advises matching the main fabric color, or using beige or mid gray, which blend with almost everything. Karen Brown found that regular cotton thread shredded and broke before she could finish a seam no matter how careful she was, and switched to a doubled fine thread instead. If your thread keeps giving up halfway down a seam, that is the reason, and a finer thread from our thread collection will solve it.
Small scissors. A fine point embroidery scissor for trimming fabric and snipping thread close to the work. This is one of the few places where a large scissor is genuinely worse.
A thimble. Not optional once you pass the first hour. Sixteen to eighteen stitches per inch means a great many needle pushes, and the pad of your middle finger will tell you about it. Silicone, metal and leather all work, and people are very particular about which. If a thimble does not suit you, stick-on pads or a plain adhesive bandage will get you through.
Clips. Small clips, binder clips or magnets hold two pieces together while you sew, which means your left hand is not clenched around the work for an hour. This sounds like a small thing and is not.
Optionally, a water soluble glue stick. More on that below, because it is the one genuine fork in the road.
The papers, and four ways to get them
The paper is the whole technique, so it is worth a moment. It needs to be stiff enough that fabric folds against something, and soft enough to bend when the work gets three dimensional. GourmetQuilter describes the target well: a stiff paper or a very lightweight card, quite pliable. Too light and there is nothing to fold against. Too heavy and it is hard to work with, and it will not flex when you need to fold a rosette over to reach a seam.
Buy them pre-cut. The biggest time saver, and it saves your hands the work of cutting hundreds of small shapes. Sherri McConnell of A Quilting Life uses pre-cut hexagon papers with one inch sides for her Grandmother's Flower Garden blocks, and reuses them.
Print them. Draw or copy the shape into a word processing or drawing file, repeat it as many times as fit on a page, and print. The Quilter's Bible adds one warning here that is easy to get wrong: if you are printing onto freezer paper, print on the non-shiny side, and only with an inkjet printer. A laser printer works with heat, and heat and freezer paper inside a printer is a repair bill.
Trace them. Cut one master template from acrylic or metal and draw around it. Master templates are durable and they double as fussy cutting windows, which is a second use worth having.
Punch them. A shape punch turns old greeting cards and the advertising postcards that arrive in the mail into papers, at exactly the right weight. This is the cheapest option and the most satisfying.
One more route, if you want to draft your own hexagons rather than copy someone else's: isometric paper is ruled in sixty degree triangles, and a hexagon is six of them. Any size you like, drawn accurately, without a compass.
Cutting the fabric
The fabric piece is larger than the paper, because it has to fold over. How much larger is a question nobody agrees on, and it turns out not to matter very much.
The Quilter's Bible says a quarter inch further out all around, cut by eye. Sherri McConnell cuts about three eighths of an inch larger all around, and says outright that it does not have to be exact, that you can wobble it off with your scissors. Karen Brown gives the range as a quarter to three eighths, and mentions quilters who skip the question entirely and use squares half an inch bigger than the shape without trimming them at all.
They are all right, and the reason is worth understanding. The paper sets the finished size, not the fabric. The seam allowance only has to be big enough to fold over and stay folded. Extra is bulk, and short is a corner that will not cover, but between those two limits the technique simply does not care.
So use the amount that suits your patience. If you want speed without measuring, the Bible's suggestion is to cut a strip half an inch wider than the shape with a rotary cutter and subcut from that. If you want speed and you have the equipment, a die cutter cuts a stack at once. If you want no equipment at all, rough squares work.
The freedom goes further than the size. GourmetQuilter points out that the fabric does not even have to start as the right shape. Squares or random scraps will fold over a hexagon perfectly well. Only the paper needs to be accurate.
Basting, and the one real disagreement in english paper piecing
Basting is how the fabric stays wrapped around the paper while you work. There are two methods, both correct, and quilters hold genuine opinions about which.
Thread basting
The traditional method. Center the paper on the wrong side of the fabric, fold one edge over the paper edge as tightly as you can, then fold the next, making sure you have a crisp fold at each corner. Take a stitch to hold what you have folded, then work around the shape, folding and stitching as you go.
There are two versions of this, and the difference is whether you go through the paper.
Through the paper is the older way. The Quilter's Bible describes it that way, and GourmetQuilter demonstrates it: the needle goes through fabric, paper and all. At each corner, finger press the fold, flip the corner over, bring the needle up through the folded corner and back down nearby. Make the stitches large rather than small, because they are coming out later and small stitches are only work you have to undo. There is no need to knot the end, because it is temporary.
Not through the paper is the other way. Sherri McConnell folds the edge, then takes a stitch across the back from one fold to the other, catching the fabric underneath and the fabric on top but never the paper. She backs it up twice at the start and again at the end. The advantage is real: the paper comes out without unpicking anything, and the paper survives to be used again.
Both are basting. Neither is precious. The stitches are temporary and the paper is not a keepsake.
Glue basting
Faster, and the reason a lot of quilters switched. Use a water soluble fabric glue stick. Place the paper on the wrong side of the fabric and run glue along the seam allowance, then fold the fabric over onto it and press it down with your fingers.
GourmetQuilter does three sides at a time, for a practical reason: the glue dries quickly, and if you do all six at once the first one has set before you reach it. The glue dries clear, so it disappears as you work. Once the shape is stuck you can press it with an iron if you want a sharper edge, which the paper tolerates without complaint.
There is one tip here that will save you a great deal of irritation, and it comes from Karen Brown. Do not put the glue right on the edge of the paper. That edge is exactly where your needle goes through when you join the pieces, and glue there will gum up the needle. Put the glue just above the edge instead, on the seam allowance, and the needle stays clean.
A purple or colored glue stick is easier to see while you work and dries clear anyway. Specialty glue pens give better control if you are doing very small pieces.
So which one
Speed favors glue, clearly. Sherri McConnell does not use the glue method at all, and her reason is not speed but the fabric: she does not want extra glue in it. That is a legitimate position, particularly for a quilt that is meant to last generations, and nobody has ever proved her wrong.
The honest answer is that both methods produce the same quilt, and the choice is about how you feel regarding glue in cotton. Try twenty hexagons each way before you commit to a thousand. Whichever you pick, the joining stitch that follows is identical.
The quilter's knot
A small thing that makes hand sewing better, and most people who have never been taught it are still tying an overhand knot and hoping. This is Karen Brown's description, step by step.
Lay the thread across your forefinger. Cross the needle over the thread. Twist the thread two to four times around the needle. Transfer the twist to the opposite forefinger and thumb, holding it secure. Draw the needle up through the twist, keeping the twist pinched until all the thread has been pulled through.
What you get is a small, dense knot sitting exactly at the end of the thread, rather than a lump somewhere near it. Two or three twists for fine thread, four for thicker. It takes about a week of doing it before your hands stop thinking about it.
Joining the pieces with a whip stitch
This is the stitch that builds the quilt, and it is the part worth slowing down for.
Take two prepared pieces and align them right sides together, so the corners match. Clip them if they want to shift. Make a quilter's knot, then thread the needle between the paper and the fabric so the knot is hidden inside, bringing it out at the corner, and take a double stitch there to secure it.
Then whip stitch along the edge. Pick up only a couple of threads from the fold on each side. You are not sewing through the paper, and you should not be. Sew right on the folded edge and you will catch the fabric without catching the paper, and the needle will move freely. End with another double stitch at the far corner.
Three details separate a seam that disappears from a seam that shows.
The stitch is small. About sixteen to eighteen per inch. That is small enough that from the front you will struggle to find the seam.
The whip stitch has two parts, and they do different jobs. The short part of the stitch holds the two fabrics together. The whip part advances you up the seam. Karen Brown's point is that keeping the holding part short is what makes the stitches almost invisible from the right side. If you let both parts get long, you get a seam you can see from across the room.
Keep your thread short. Sixteen stitches to the inch means a lot of friction, and a long thread drags through that friction on every stitch, wearing itself out and eventually breaking. A short thread breaks less. It is also kinder to your wrist and elbow, because a long thread means a long pull, and a long pull repeated a thousand times is an injury waiting to introduce itself.
Do not pull the stitches tight. The Quilter's Bible is explicit about this: if you pull too hard the finished work will not lie flat. The thread should hold the two edges together, not squeeze them.
Sherri McConnell adds a labor saving habit worth copying. Rather than cutting the thread, knotting and starting again for every seam, travel the thread along the back of the work to the next seam you want to sew. Over a rosette of seven hexagons that saves a dozen knots and a good deal of thread.
The Y-seam, which is not frightening by hand
When three pieces meet at a point, the three seams form a Y. On a sewing machine this is the seam people avoid, plan around, and redesign quilts to escape. By hand, with paper inside the pieces, it is barely a thing.
Here is the whole of it. You have pieces one and two already sewn together. Take piece three. Sew piece one to piece three, down the seam to the end, and finish with a double stitch in the corner. Now reorient the work, aligning piece two with piece three, clipping if you need to. Fold piece one out of the way. Start with a double stitch and whip stitch down the second seam to the end, and double stitch again.
That is it. Two ordinary seams, sewn one after the other, with a pause in between to turn the work around.
The freedom that hand sewing gives you here is the part machine piecers will not believe. You can fold the finished pieces right out of the way, because the paper is not precious and it will bend and spring back. As the work grows and becomes harder to handle, use as many clips as you need to stop it shifting, and turn the whole thing around as often as you want. Karen Brown says she sometimes turns a fiddly seam back and forth several times, and from the front nobody would ever know.
One rule about direction. As long as the short holding part of the whip stitch is catching both fabrics and the whip part is advancing you along, it does not matter which way the whip is going. Do not add a rule that is not there.
When to take the papers out
The answer is the same from every source, which is rare enough to be worth noting. A paper comes out when every edge of that piece has been sewn to another piece.
Until then it is holding the shape and the accuracy. After that it is holding nothing, and it is stopping you from pressing the work flat.
In practice most quilters keep the papers in longer than that. Sherri McConnell takes the center paper out of a Grandmother's Flower Garden block as soon as the flower is complete, and leaves the outer papers in until she is ready to sew the block onto its background, because without them the block is flimsy and hard to handle. That is the general rule: inner papers out early, outer papers in until the edge is attached to something.
Taking them out is gentle work. If you thread basted through the paper, pull the basting first. If you glue basted or basted behind the paper, bend the paper slightly and it lifts away. If one sticks, nudge it with something blunt, never with anything sharp, because the fabric is right there. And if a paper tears, it does not matter, as long as every piece of it comes out.
Papers are reusable, which is the quiet economy of this technique. Sherri McConnell irons hers flat after removal to take the wrinkles out. A set of hexagon papers can go around a quilt several times.
Beyond the hexagon
The hexagon is what Karen Brown calls the gateway shape, and there is a reason everybody starts there. Six equal sides, every angle the same, no orientation to keep track of, and it tiles the plane without a single gap. It is the most forgiving shape in quilting.
It is also not the only one. The Quilter's Bible names triangles, diamonds and hexagons as the most common and useful, and notes that they combine happily with squares and rectangles.
The honeycomb is a hexagon stretched along one axis. It is the shape behind the traditional Lucy Boston block, and it changes the rhythm of a quilt completely while asking nothing new of you technically.
Half hexagons are a hexagon cut across, and they will build back up into larger hexagons or run in rows as a pattern of their own.
The sixty degree diamond is the other workhorse. Six of them make a six pointed star. Three of them, placed in three steps of value, make the cube that gives you Tumbling Blocks. A diamond is also a hexagon waiting to happen, since a hexagon can be built from sixty degree diamonds.
Octagons come from a square, and elongated octagons make handsome appliqué shapes on a plain background.
Now the one thing that changes when you leave the hexagon behind, and it catches everyone out once.
Any time a shape has an angle narrower than ninety degrees, the seam allowance at that point does not fold neatly away. It produces a small tail of fabric sticking past the point. Leave it. Do not trim it off. It can fold to one side or the other, and which side you choose matters later, because when two tails meet in a seam you do not want them pointing into each other. That is too much bulk in one place, and it shows.
Fold them so they rotate in the same direction around a point, or simply lie opposite one another. If you get to the sewing and find you have folded one the wrong way, lift the fabric and glue or baste it back down the other way. Nothing is lost.
Six classic english paper piecing patterns
These are the arrangements that have carried the technique for two centuries. The Quilter's Bible lists them together, and they are a good map of what the shapes can do.
Grandmother's Flower Garden. A center hexagon, six around it as petals, and often a ring of a single color beyond that. The design most people picture when they hear the word patchwork, and still the best first project.
Field of Diamonds. Sixty degree diamonds laid out in a grid, where the value placement does all the work and the shape does none of it.
Six-point Star. Six diamonds around a point. The building block of a hundred other designs.
Brick Pile. Rectangles offset in rows, which sounds plain and is not, because the paper gives you edges that no rotary cutter will match.
Ocean Wave. Triangles arranged to move across the quilt in bands.
Inner City. Hexagons divided into three diamonds and shaded in three steps of value, so they read as cubes. The same optical trick as Tumbling Blocks, worked from hexagons rather than loose diamonds.
If you want to see how a flower is assembled in practice, Sherri McConnell's order is worth copying: sew each petal hexagon to the center hexagon first, one at a time all the way around, and only then go back and sew the petals to each other. It keeps the block flat and it keeps the center honest.
Fussy cutting, which is where it gets addictive
Fussy cutting means positioning the template over a specific part of a print rather than cutting at random. In most quilting it is a nicety. In english paper piecing it is the whole point, because you are working with small shapes arranged symmetrically around a center, and that is exactly the geometry that turns a repeat print into a kaleidoscope.
Take six pieces cut from the identical spot on a repeating print. Arrange them around a center. What appears is rotational symmetry, sometimes mirror symmetry too, and it looks like far more work than it was. Karen Brown's description is that it takes the thing to a whole new level of spectacular, and that is not an overstatement.
This is where a clear acrylic master template earns its place, because you can see the print through it and position it before you draw. It is also the reason to buy more than one repeat of a fabric you love.
Can you do english paper piecing by machine
Partly, and it is worth knowing what you get and what you give up.
Kim Jamieson-Hirst of Chatterbox Quilts worked out a machine route for quilters who like the look but do not enjoy hand stitching. Instead of paper, she cuts the template from stabilizer, which stays in permanently. She presses the fabric with spray starch first so it holds a crease, then glues the seam allowance down over the stabilizer template, working around the shape and pressing as she goes, on parchment paper so the glue never touches her pressing mat.
The prepared shapes are then glued onto a background, butted right up against each other with no gaps between them, and quilted through. The quilting is what holds them permanently.
Be clear about what this is. The shapes have properly turned, finished edges, not raw ones, so it does not read as raw edge appliqué. But the shapes are being appliquéd onto a background rather than joined edge to edge to each other, and the stabilizer stays in the quilt. It is a different construction that arrives at a similar look, much faster.
Her other piece of advice applies to any new technique and is the most useful sentence in the video: try it on a small project first, see how it works, make the adjustments, and only then start something big.
Making it portable, which is the real reason people stay
Everyone who does this seriously has a bag, and it is not an accident.
GourmetQuilter keeps papers, glue stick, scissors, needle, thread and cut hexagons in a small hard case, and the flat lid doubles as a work surface for gluing in a car. Her point is that because it is always packed, it comes out of the door every time she does, just in case there is time to fill.
That is the whole strategy. The project has to be already assembled, or the fifteen minutes will pass while you are still looking for the thread.
Prepare in batches rather than one at a time. Baste thirty shapes in an evening at the kitchen table, put them in the bag, and then the portable part of the work is purely stitching, which needs one hand free and no surface at all. A stack of basted hexagons is the most useful thing to own in this technique.
It also changes what a long project feels like. Karen Brown has been working on one hexagon quilt for years and describes it as something you do in stages, which is not a failure of the project but the design of it. A quilt that only advances when you sit down at a machine is a quilt that stops when life gets busy. A quilt in a bag does not stop.
Download the one page english paper piecing reference, free. The whole method plus a hexagon size table: side length, width flat to flat, height point to point, the fabric square to cut with a three eighths allowance, and the finished size of a rosette of seven. It is built to live in the bag with the papers.
Your first english paper piecing project
Start small. Not because the technique is hard, but because finishing something is what makes you start the next thing, and a quilt made of nine hundred hexagons is not a first project.
Karen Brown's recommendation is a pin cushion or a pillow. Both are honest suggestions: a rosette of seven hexagons is a pin cushion, and three rosettes is a pillow front, and either one teaches you every step of the technique from basting to removing the papers.
Here is a first project sized to one evening plus one waiting room.
Cut seven hexagon papers with one inch sides. Cut seven fabric pieces, a generous quarter inch larger all around, six of them from the same print and one from something that contrasts. Baste all seven, whichever way you chose. Sew each of the six to the center hexagon, one at a time, all the way around. Then sew the six petals to each other, traveling your thread along the back between seams. Take out the center paper as soon as it is surrounded. Leave the outer six papers in until you have decided what the rosette is going to become.
That rosette is a Grandmother's Flower Garden block, and it took the same number of steps that the largest quilt in the technique takes. There is nothing else to learn. From here it is repetition and design.
The one thing worth doing before you start: pick a color for the second ring now, if you intend to have one. Traditional Grandmother's Flower Garden quilts use a single color for the path between the flowers, and deciding that after you have made forty flowers is how people end up with forty flowers in a drawer.
Where english paper piecing meets the rest of your quilting
The technique does not have to produce a whole quilt on its own, and historically it often did not.
A finished piece of english paper piecing has turned edges on every outside edge already, which means it appliqués onto a background beautifully. The Quilter's Bible shows a wall hanging built exactly that way from elongated octagons, edged with a narrow trim, with the same shape used again for the hand quilting. Turn the outer seam allowance under a quarter inch, appliqué the whole unit down, and you have a medallion.
Hexagons also solve a problem that comes up in ordinary piecing. Our article on a hexagon quilt built with no inset seams shows the machine route to the same look, which is worth reading alongside this one if you want to compare the two approaches on the same shape.
If curves interest you more than angles, hand piecing the apple core block uses the same hand sewing skills on a curved edge. And if you want to see what the technique looks like a century on, the hundred year old hexagon quilt is a reminder that the papers sometimes stayed in, and that quilters have been writing on them since the beginning.
For a closer look at the two basting methods side by side, there is also basting and stitching techniques. And when you get to tracing your own templates, the sandpaper trick that stops a template sliding is thirty seconds of preparation that saves a lot of crooked hexagons.
More to start from, all free, in our beginner quilt patterns collection.
Common questions
How long does an english paper piecing quilt take? Longer than a machine quilt and that is the wrong question. It is measured in months or years rather than weekends, and it advances in the gaps rather than in sessions. People who enjoy it are not waiting for it to be over.
Do I have to use hexagons? No. Hexagons, diamonds, triangles, honeycombs, half hexagons, octagons, squares and rectangles all work, and they combine. Hexagons are simply the easiest place to learn the motion.
Does the paper stay in the quilt? No. It comes out once every edge of a piece is sewn to a neighbor, and the papers can be used again. Some antique pieces did keep their papers, but that was never the plan.
Can I sew through the paper when joining pieces? You should not. Sew on the folded edge, catching only a couple of threads of fabric from each side. Going through the paper makes the needle fight you and makes the papers impossible to reuse.
My thread keeps breaking. What am I doing wrong? Probably nothing. Sixteen to eighteen stitches per inch creates real friction, and ordinary cotton thread shreds under it. Use a finer, stronger thread, doubled if it is very fine, and keep your working length short.
Glue or thread basting? Glue is faster. Thread leaves nothing behind. Both make the same quilt. Try each on twenty pieces and pick the one your hands prefer.
What size hexagon should I start with? One inch sides is the common starting size and a sensible one. Smaller pieces are prettier and slower, and very small pieces need better eyesight and a finer needle than a first project deserves.
Is english paper piecing good for scraps? It is the best use for them in quilting. The pieces are small, nothing needs to match, and the variety is the design. A scrap that is too small for anything else is a hexagon.
Marbelia
P.S. The thing nobody warns you about is what it does to the way you look at fabric in a shop. Once you have made one rosette from a fussy cut print, you stop seeing prints and start seeing what six of them would do arranged in a circle. It is a pleasant affliction and there is no cure that I know of.
