Cherish Stitching Add-On – Glue Pen, Needles, Thread & Thread Butter

Everything your hands need for the first month of Cherish, in one small parcel.

English paper piecing asks very little of you: a needle, a thread, and somewhere comfortable to sit. But the right few things make an enormous difference to how the stitching feels, and they are not obvious when you are starting out. So we have put them together.

What's inside

• Sewline Glue Pen — the neatest way to baste fabric to your paper pieces. A fine, water-soluble glue in a retractable pen, so you dab rather than smear, and the papers still pop out cleanly at the end. Glue basting is quicker than thread basting and leaves no stitches to unpick.
• Angie & Coco Thread Butter, 30g — our own beeswax and jojoba balm, made here in Rosebery. Draw your thread across it before you stitch and it stops tangling, stops fraying, and glides through the fold. Choose your scent: Banksia, Vanilla, Bergamot, Rose Geranium or Australian Sandalwood.
• Bohin Milliner Needles No. 9, pack of 15 — long, fine and beautifully sharp. Milliners are the needle of choice for EPP because the eye is no wider than the shaft, so the whole needle passes through the fold without dragging. Made in France.
• Mettler Silk-Finish Cotton 60wt, 200m, in Ash (colour 2791) — a fine, strong, mercerised Egyptian cotton in a pale, soft grey. Sixty weight is thin enough to melt into the seam, and Ash is the quiet one that behaves itself against every fabric in your Cherish palette, light or dark.

Already have a glue pen?

Plenty of stitchers do. Grab a packet of Sewline Glue Pen Refills instead — one refill will not see you through twelve months of basting, and running out mid-block is a particular kind of annoying.

Why one pale grey instead of matching your fabrics?

New EPP stitchers often try to match thread to fabric and end up with a drawer full of spools. You do not need to. In hand piecing the thread sits inside the fold, and the only part that shows is a row of tiny whipstitches along the edge. What matters is that the thread is fine and that it does not flash against anything.

Most of your stitching in Cherish happens in the border rounds — twelve half hexagons and eighteen diamonds per block, against one centre hexagon. Those rounds are usually your lighter basics, which is why a pale thread is the safe choice rather than a mid grey. Ash reads as shadow on almost everything. One spool will carry you a long way into the quilt.

A note on the needles

Fifteen needles sounds like a lot for one quilt. It isn't. Needles blunt with use, and a tired needle is the most common reason hand stitching starts to feel like hard work. Change it more often than you think you should.

An optional add-on for the Cherish Block of the Month. It arrives with your first month's parcel, so there is no postage to pay.