Sip Tea and EPP Party 2024

Welcome to the 6th season of the Sip Tea and EPP party! Can you believe it’s been six wonderful years already? Time flies when we are sewing together! Over the years, we have been sharing our passion for English Paper Piecing (EPP) and hand sewing, and building an incredible community along the way. This is the fourth year that we (Irina @nordiccrafter and I, Larisa @stitchingnotes) are hosting the party together! It’s been an amazing journey, and we are thrilled to begin another year of sewing together with you.

Our party is back on the 18th of January, and we start the year with a sneak peek at our plans and a few small changes coming your way this season as well as an introduction of the party to new people.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart!

As the Winter Mystery Project Sew Along comes to an end, I cannot help but feel grateful for the joy and excitement it brought to me over the last three weeks. From the very start, my dear friend and co-host Irina and I wanted to share some happiness and mystery with all of you. We wanted to create a special experience that would leave you feeling intrigued and uplifted, would help you learn new skills in an easy way, and hopefully would help you make new friends along the way and so the idea of the Mystery Project Sew Along was born. This Sew Along was planned for the autumn of the last year, and even though the prototype of the basket was made, we had to postpone it till winter due to many personal reasons and the challenges of this design as we were not convinced it was suitable for the beginner sewists.

Get your Stash Ready

I am happy to welcome all of you to the first week of our Summer Sew Along. It feel a bit strange writing Summer as it is Winter here in Australia. :-) I hope you had a chance to go through your textiles and select a few items that you think you might use for repurposing during the Sew Easy Sew Along "Ideas and inspirations for working with recycled materials" for Sip Tea and EPP with Irina @nordiccrafter and Larisa @stitchingnotes.

Summer Sew Along for Sip Tea and EPP

Sew Easy: Summer Sew Along for Sip Tea and EPP. Ideas and Inspirations for working with recycled materials.

It’s that time of the year when Irina and I are ready to host another easy, relaxing and fun Sew Along for our weekly Sip Tea and EPP party. It’s summer in the northern hemisphere and many of you are busy enjoying the warm lazy days of the summer holidays so we decided to keep this Sew Along even more relaxed and undemanding for you. We hope you can join us again to learn something new and get inspired.

Spring Mystery Project Sew Along: Final Week

Welcome back to the final week of the Spring Mystery Sew Along with Irina @nordiccrafter and I (Larisa @stitchingnotes)! We are delighted to see so many of you working on your pouches and adding the final finishing touches. We absolutely love seeing your creativity blossoming and your desire to challenge yourselves with new skills.

Spring Mystery Project Sew Along Week 2

Tips for using fusible foam and quilting.

Welcome to the second week of Spring Mystery Project Sew Along for the Sip Tea and EPP party with Irina @nordiccrafter and Larisa @stitchingnotes. We are absolutely smitten with all the delightful tumbler arches you have been making during the past week. Once again, we would like to thank you all for sewing with us and trusting us to lead you on this mystery adventure.

Spring Mystery Project Sew Along

The long awaited Spring Mystery Project Sew Along for Sip Tea and EPP will start next Thursday, April 7th, 2022 and we hope you can join us this time as well and have some fun sewing together with us.

Hexagon Templates

Welcome to the Sip Tea and EPP party! Irina @nordiccrafter and I are very excited to start our new adventures this year with a Mystery Hexagon Project. And as the name suggests, you will need hexagons for this sweet item that we are going to sew in unison.

I have put together a one page file for your convenience. All you need to do is to print this page out and cut out your own shapes. Please check the 1" square to make sure that the hexagons are of the right size. And one more thing - don't forget to use a separate pair of scissors for this step! :-)

Happy partying! Larisa xo

Sip Tea and EPP 2022

Welcome to Sip Tea and EPP! It's the fourth year that our weekly party has been running on Instagram and Irina @nordiccrafter and I are very happy and excited to be sewing together with you.

Sip Tea and EPP Sew Along

Hello my dear friends! It's been forever since I have posted anything here and I have truly missed this space. It's been a challenging year for many of us and it affected us all in different ways. For me it was a loss of creativity. That little spark that drove me to stay up late at night and create something new was hardly shining. Hopefully life is going back its normal pace and I do feel that my tiny spark of creativity is beginning to shine brighter.

Sip Tea and EPP: Introduction

Welcome to our first week of Sip Tea and EPP party!

I am very excited to start a new season of slow hand sewing and to share this journey with lovely Irina from @nordiccrafter and all of you.

Sip Tea and EPP Party 2021

Happy New Year, my dear friends! I hope the year has started on a good note for you and you are looking forward to another year of slow hand sewing and creating to warm your heart.

Embellishing Hexagon Flowers with Floral Motifs

This month during our Sip Tea and EPP party we are talking about adding embellishments to your English Paper Piecing projects. There are many ways you can beautify your hexagons or any other shapes of your EPP projects by adding small embroidery motifs, foundation paper piecing designs or some hand quilting. These small additions will give your work a unique and charming touch.

How I Make Hexagon Flowers for Grandma's Love Quilt

I have been asked multiple times how I put together my hexagon flowers for the "Grandma's Love" quilt that I am working on at the moment. I thought I would take you behind the scenes and show you the process from choosing the prints for each hexagon flower to finishing the hand embroidery in the centre of each flower.

Sip Tea and EPP Party 2020

Welcome to our second season of Sip Tea and EPP Party! Lauren from Molly and Mama and I are very excited to finally start this season of slow stitching to warm your heart. This year we are a bit more organised and prepared as you can see. We have a list of themes ready for the next twelve months so you can get ready too and prepare all your supplies, projects and questions you might have.

Sip Tea and EPP: Being Productive

This week we are talking about being productive, and it can have different meanings to all of us. Some can sew an entire quilt in a week and call this being productive, while for others just a tiny simple make can feel like a great achievement as well. It all depends on our own personal situations, skills and needs. We should not compare our own abilities and the size and the number of creations that other can do, but rather be driven by what feels right for each of us personally. I am going to speak from my own experience as a maker of small things because this is what is important to me and this is what makes me feel good. I sew because I love it and I sew because it makes me feel great, I also love sharing what I learn along the way. Some days I can sew for a few hours, some just for a few minutes and there are days when I feel totally unproductive and stuck, and not able to sew anything at all for various reasons. I worked out that I have to MAKE TIME for just a few tiny stitches a day to help me feel better and get me back on track with sewing.

Sip Tea and EPP: Thread Conditioning

This week at out Sip Tea and EPP Party we are talking about thread conditioning. Before I go any further and share my experience, I would like to say that it is very important to do your own search, try things out and decide what works for you personally. We all use different techniques, threads, needles, fabrics, so it is extremely important not to simply follow others, but rather find what works best for you.