Happy Hexie New Year!

Happy New Year everybody!

Before Christmas, the design wall looked like this image on the left and now it's full of hexie flowers!

You would have thought I'd have had enough of hexagon projects at this stage but nope, still hand sewing hexies right into the New Year!

A lot of the predictions for this year included more slow stitching, hand sewing projects like the New Hexagon & Millefiori/La Passacaglia projects that were very popular last year.  I have loved following everyone's projects on these, particularly Wendy's that she has shared on her blog Wendy's Quilts and more!  Though not a deliberate decision on my part to do so much hand sewing, it has been a blessing.  My poor Janome, (less than a year old), has given up sewing!  She is going back to the shop this week for repair.

Resting in the spare bedroom over Christmas taking a break!

I started hearing clunking noises in the bobbin during free motion quilting and it got worse and worse until eventually the bobbin case jammed up completely.  So while that's been out of action, I dusted off my small Pfaff and finished up a table runner for Mum.  This was a super quick project.  Some layer cake squares cut into 5" x 10" bricks with some 5"x5" in between and quilted with a wiggly circle pattern. 

She likes it a lot and I have to keep reminding myself sometimes simple is the best way to go!  I have a habit of gravitating towards complex designs and forget that simple can be pretty and effective too!

So while my main machine is resting at the repair shop, it's hand stitching for me.  Last year (weird to be typing that still!) our branch of the Irish Patchwork Society swapped 2 1/2" squares, about 400 of them!  We were challenged to make a quilt using the squares and trying to do something different I decided to make hexagons out of them!

During one of the nights Mum stayed over in our house, we spent a few hours sorting the squares into colours (while watching Foyle's War on the telly!)  Before Christmas, I arranged them into flowers and stacked them all on the lid of an Ikea box.

This meant I could sit on the sofa and sew away to my hearts content while watching more TV.  All 4 Indiana Jones, Kelly's Heroes, Back to the Future, Santa Paws, and of course my favourite: Doctor Who!

I thought I was on to a winning plan here but I underestimated how long it takes to hand sew 400+152 more I added to the pile to make up my design!

And there was Wilbur!  The dogs loved the fact that we were around so much and took up residence on the sofa beside me.  Wilbur got it into his head that my colourful hexies must be sweets and tried a few times to eat them!

Guess who the culprit was!

Thankfully he didn't mange to tip the whole lot off of my lap but he did succeed in knocking over the Christmas tree 5 times!

Being a Basset Hound, Wilbur has long ears and you have to clean them for him every few weeks.  He hates this and hid under the tree when he saw G reaching for the ear cleaning bottle.  #1.

#2 & #3 happened at night.  No idea what happened.  Woke up to find tree tipped over twice.

#4 I'm blaming G for not putting the tree back properly as it didn't last long this time at all and broke the lights.

#5 My fault!  I left a box of Cadbury's biscuits in a Christmas present bag under the tree and big nosed Basset must've been having a sniff as we found teeth marks in the tin and the tree on the floor.  Thankfully the new lights still work!  At this stage, I was nearly tempted to give up on the tree but I took a deep breath and made a cup of tea and put it back up again!

Beginnings of a design - more on this later!

That's kind of how I feel about these hexies at this stage.  Take a deep breath, make a cup of tea and get on with it.  The challenge deadline is this Friday at our first meeting of 2016!  A busy start to the new year, even without my big sewing machine.  How was your  holiday break?  Hope all had a lovely time and here's to a slow stitching, handmade new year!

WIP Wednesday - quilting the Christmas hexies!

I had to step away from the computer at the weekend and get back to finishing my Christmas Hexagon samples for the IPS meeting this Friday. I decided to put the white snowflake on a wintery grey background instead of the red I had originally chosen. At last Thursday's sewing night, this was the one everyone preferred. The plan is to place a chunky white candle in the upper right corner and use it for the centre of the table

Straight line down to a point and make a perpendicular line to the left and back to centre.  Then right and back to centre, 45 deg up to left corner and back to centre and then down to the bottom right and back to centre.  Same for the other side, up and down at an angle and finally straight down to the next point.

In keeping with the snowflake design I quilted it free motion with some asterisks that to me look like stars.  I really like how they came out against this Kona Steel background.  I glued the hexies in place with dots of basting glue and now have to stitch them in place and decide what colour to bind it in. I'm thinking of a white print or maybe a blue?

I just got the last few hexagons out the remnants of this blue fabric to finish this Star of David design. I really like the star made in the empty spaces and straight line quilted these guys through each hexie point as per the this tutorial on Modern Handcraft.  Thinking of binding this one in red!

I made a snowy Christmas tree and then thought about spacing it like the Modern Handcraft tutorial so made a second one!

I really do like this way of quilting them.  It is really fast and looks very effective!  No idea what colour to bind this one in!

When I saw this post by Little Penguin Quilts on using Hexies to make a boring cushion look trendy, I thought that would be cool to try on a plain beige/cream cover I have sitting in the clean laundry pile.  So I pulled some more traditional Christmas fabric (sorry I don't know the name - came as a layer cake bundle from the Limerick Quilt Centre!) and got this far with another Christmas tree.

I'm going to be giving these away at this stage I've got so many now!

Linking up to

Catching up to myself!

I am a bit behind myself this week - this was meant to be a work in progress Wednesday post!  Poor Wilbs had a seizure and frightened G, I must admit that the longer it was going on I thought it was curtains too but thankfully the dog popped out of it as if nothing happened, and straight away went to his food bowl looking for dinner!

If you've never seen a grand mal seizure in dogs, its quite a thing.  He fell onto his side, eyes wide open, neck arched and mouth chomping while his little legs were running like crazy.  The danger is in overheating so if it happens again we have to make sure his temperature doesn't go too high and stick valium up his butt - I kid you not!  He's 9 and pushing on, poor mite.  I must say though he his loving all the extra attention we've been giving him!

I did get my Dog Gone Cute thank you cushions finished and wrote about quilting them here on the Modern Quilters Ireland blog for a book review of Christina Cameli's book Step by Step Free Motion Quilting. 

Most of the rest of the week, when I've had a chance I've been playing with Hexagons.  There must be something in the air as I've seen a few Hexie posts this week.

Our branch of the Irish Patchwork Society are having a hand sewing night making Christmas themed projects.   I thought this might be good time to play around with Snowflakes.  Messing around with hexagon I came up with a few layouts that use 60-90 hexies.  Am I a crazy to try making some of these?  I found some bead designs on this web page at Bead Merrily and thought they'd make great patchwork placemats so worked them out with 3/4" hexies too. 

They would be nice as cushions but I think I need a little break from cushions at the minute!

I know red and green are the traditional colours but I quite like a frosty Christmas scheme so ended up with all these variations in blue and white and some bigger and simpler 2" Hexagon designs at the end.

Then I started playing with spacing the hexies and found a Star of David pattern. Not sure the religious connotations on this one!  Still, I like it with the darker grey background on the top left.

Finally I came up with a quilt design, I am really tempted to try!  I have a to do list longer than both arms but this one, like Wilbur is begging for attention! Only 19 2" Hexies and 35 1"Hexies appliqued per star- should be a quick make, right?

Maybe a reversible quilt with a night time version on the back?  I think I need to stop playing now, but wouldn't this be a fun thing to do with star constellations?  Funny where you end up from the first idea isn't it? 

I know its nearly Halloween but if you are in the mood for more Christmas inspired projects, Ho, Ho, Ho and On We Sew  is being guest hosted this month by Sandra Sews and Ella & Nesta's Little Room!

WIP Medallion Baby Quilt

It's a real work in progress here today.  I'm making my centre panel using hexies for the Medallion-A-Long hosted by the Modern Quilt Guild of Ireland.  It's open to anyone to join in.  It's tons of fun but I'm a little behind schedule.

I'm supposed to have a centre panel and the first border on by now bringing this up to 24.5" square.  Well, I'm not following path 1, I'm doing the slightly improvised while still following guidelines path 2!  My centre block is rectangular measuring 18.5 x 24.5" already without the first border on and will hopefully measure 24.5" x 30.5" when border 1 is done.

I have a balloon and a kite all basted up and ready for joining.  I underestimated the time it takes to hand piece hexagons so still working on these guys!

There will be clouds in front of the sun (this is Ireland after all!) and I found this lovely cloud like fabric in a new bundle of Tailored by Annette Tatum.  I bought this on sale from Craftsy and it has lovely pastel colours going through.  Very baby quilt friendly.

 The guidelines are to introduce as many fabrics as you want to use in the quilt in the first third and as I'm making this from a mixture of scraps and stash I've gone a bit mad.  I've got multi-coloured flowers and will have 2 little bees from the pastel fabric buzzing around them.

So far the plan for the first border will be a chequerboard with hearts in the corner.  I'm going to need 3" hearts so I'm hoping to draw up a template and paper piece them! 

 So a bit behind but making progress.  Linking up to Modern Quilt Guild of Ireland and

Medallion Quilt Along

The Modern Irish Quilters are having a Quilt-A-Long.  It is for a Medallion quilt and there are two choices.  Follow along building borders around a central panel of 15", like a star or a paper pieced centre, or do your own thing, following guidelines from Catbird Quilt Studio's series on how to make a Medallion Quilt.

I have ideas for both and I'm really intrigued by the design hints on both streams. The centre panel should be 1/4 to 1/3 the size of the quilt and there are hints for framing the surrounds and adding borders.  I am hoping to learn a lot!  The idea that is buzzing around my head the most is this one for a baby quilt with a centre panel made using hexagons; Something like this:

It came from playing with hexagon shapes in Microsoft Word and I ended up with a brightly coloured balloon. 
The sun and the grass came from the Craftsy 2012 BOM with Amy Gibson.  Her Block "Sunny with a chance of Hex" was used to teach Paper piecing Hexagons and she challenged us to make our own version and that's were the bees and flowers came from.   The ideas from these blocks stayed with me so adding the balloon seemed like a good idea and to add a curve to the grass and then to fill the space with a kite and some clouds maybe.

Playing with borders is giving me this so far, though it will probably change as I make it.

 

I want my centre panel to be rectangular not square and to fit all of the hexagon designs I'm going to make it 18" by 24".  To make the balloon and flowers etc I've had to learn a little about the geometry of Hexagons.  If you have no interest in Maths you can skip this bit!

You can print templates for Hexies from Incompetech and they look like this:

You enter the length of the side you want and it calculates the rest and gives you the template to cut the hexies to the correct size.

For the balloon above I wanted it to be about 5" high and there are 5 hexies stacked to make the balloon at it's highest point, so I need my individual hexies to be 1" high.

The height is the square root of 3 multiplied by s.  The square root of 3 is 1.732 (1.732 x1.732=3) so if I want a 1" height I need to divide 1 by 1.732 to get s which is 0.58".  Putting 0.58 into the website gives me this template.

I have a 5" high balloon and it will be  just under 6" across.  (W=2x0.58 which is 1.16 and there are 5 hexies so 5 x 1.16 is 5.8")

So I now have 5 templates printed for the 5 different sizes I need (balloon, flower, bee, sun, clouds).  I'll worry about the kite next week!

So for the rest of the week, I'll be busy cutting up the templates and stitching tiny hexagons together!

And for the original idea of a star centrepiece in case you are interested this is the Mosaic of favourites I found on flickr.  I am hoping for some border inspiration from these gorgeous quilts.

1. Swirling Medallion quilt top - side view, 2. Marcelle Medallion - advice please, I'm stuck, 3. Border 8, 4. Modern Medallion Top, 5. FO: Marcelle Medallion, 6. Mystery Medallion Quilt - Border 3, 7. Baisakhi Medallion Quilt, 8. Medallion Quilt detail, 9. Medallion Quilt detail, 10. Medallion Quilts on Craftsy, 11. Medallion Border #6, 12. My Quilt  

Linking up to Modern Quilt Guild of Ireland and