Flower Power - a finished quilt top!

There's nothing at all on the design wall this Monday.  I made my deadline last week and finished up that hexagon quilt top!  It's a really nice feeling to finally be done with hand sewing hexie flowers at last!  I'm calling this one Flower Power!

This quilt top came about from a fabric swap and challenge with our branch of the Irish Patchwork Society.  You can get sixteen 2 1/2"squares from a strip of fabric so we worked out a plan that if you had 25 strips you would have 400 squares - enough for a baby quilt or something bigger if you added from stash which most of us did and our finished quilts all turned out so different from each other. 

Each person cuts 25 strips of fabric or jelly roll strips from stash.  Cut each strip into 16 squares.  Take 1 square from each strip and make 16 different piles, each containing 25 different squares.  Take 16 plastic bags (like ziploc or sandwich bags) and place 1 pile into each bag and write your name or initials on the front.  Keep 1 bag and donate 15 to the group pile.  You get 15 bags back and depending on how many people sign up you may get some of your own back or all different.
 

Design idea

We got a really good mix in our swap and I was inspired by the little hexagon Flowers for Eleni that so many of us made for the beautiful quilt created by Jody of Tales of Cloth.   I wanted to try something along those lines but a little different.  I kept the black centres and cut fabric from my stash for those.  All but 1 large flower and 2 small ones came from the swapped squares.  Mum and I spent some time arranging the squares into colour families and over the Christmas I sewed them into flowers.

I also added over a 100 light grey hexagons to connect the flowers into rows.  I'm wondering now if I shouldn't have used a darker colour as it almost blends in with the background. 

I used 1" Hexagons as they are a really good fit for 2 1/2" squares and I had a bag of them from quilt now magazine so I only had to cut out 10 more printed pages of them!  And I used each paper piece more than once - I think its about 550 Hexagons in this altogether!

I had to modify my design a bit in the making as I changed my mind on the layout and didn't have enough white fabric (backing fabrics are from Dashwood Studios range Nature Trail that I bought from LoveFabric.ie) so I ended up with 1 row less than intended but to be fair this is pretty big and covers our standard double bed with overhang!  About 80" x 95" in total. 

So my first finished flimsy of 2016.  It's massively girly and I love it!  I've fallen in and out of love with this one so many times since I started it in November but am back to liking it again.  So, so, happy it's done at last.  My hands are hanging off me and need a break already.  I ended up glueing these all in place (with Roxanne's basting glue!) and am hoping to top stitch them through the quilt sandwich when I get my machine back.  I'm thinking of adding a line of black hand quilting around each flower row to add a bit of definition.  I think it needs it and by the time I get around to that my hands will have recovered!  Hope your new year is off to flying start too!

Making Progress - Hexagons

So I made 78 Hexies!  I think I have become a convert to glue basting.  When I was drafting some Snowflake designs using Hexagon pieces and the quantity required to make some of them was 60, 78 and 90 pieces I knew I was going to have to find a faster way of making these than regular thread basting.  During our Thursday night sewing session we all agreed glue might be the way to go so I googled "glue baste hexagon quilt" and found lots of stuff.   The tutorial I ended up using is by Piece O'Cake and involves glue basting with the Sewline glue pen.

I bought a Sewline pen last October at the Knitting & Stitching show in Dublin.  I tried to use it to hold an applique piece in place and it was rubbish for that so it stayed in my notions bag in the original box for a whole year.  I have since found that it is perfect for glue basting hexies and will be buying refills at this years show which is being held in a few weeks time. 

My plan was to bring these with me to the West Coast of Ireland during the bank holiday last Monday week and hand sew them into snowflakes!  I'm hoping to do some straight line quilting and applique the pieced shapes in place on Christmas coloured fabric to make some placemats for the centre of the dining table.

I got distracted by making the most of the shorter days, now the clock has gone back, and spent as much time on the beach and coastal walks with the dogs. 

Wilbur loved it though I don't think picking his way through the rocks at high tide was his favourite part!  Not a hint of any epilepsy though we had the valium the vet prescribed with us just in case. 

This weekend though I decided I'd better crack on with this project as the demo for our guild is 2 weeks away!  I  decided on the layouts above to motivate me to get on with the hand sewing and after messing about with tiny Hexagons for a bit, procrastination got the better of me and I decided to take a break and made up a few larger ones for Christmas trees.  

For the hand sewing night at our guild on the 13th, I'm going to show the option of one pieced tree and a more modern version with the hexies spaced out a bit, inspired by this tutorial I have loved and wanted to have a go at Modern Handcraft.

It always amazes me how flexible a hexagon shape can be!  Forgive the non-ironed background fabric, I've been going through my stash looking for a nice frosty blue and I think this works! 
So a bit of work to go yet but despite dragging my heels a bit, its going pretty quickly and I hope I'll get these done this week as I have to finish writing up instruction sheets for them (will share them here soon) and bee blocks to get to too!