The Hexagon Bug - 1

The first quilt I ever made was a hexagon quilt over papers 32 years ago.  The hexagons were quite large and I didn't have a clue what I was doing.  The quilt went together quite nicely and I tied it all over to keep the layers together.  Around the early eighties it was quite difficult to find a variety of nice cotton fabrics and so a lot of scraps were used along with anything else I could find.   I was quite disappointed with the finished quilt and I realised later it was because  there was not much contrast in the fabrics and I didn't know a thing then about design.

Over the years the quilt has mellowed and I have grown quite fond of it even though it is falling to pieces in places.  It has certainly been used and loved to death! The edge repair was made 30 years ago when it was left to close to Eric the hamsters cage and he took a large nibble!

As you can see I didn't have a clue about putting a quilt together.



















In the last few years there has been a lot of interest in English patchwork techniques and some gorgeous examples have been made especially coming from Japan.  I have noticed  a larger amount of hexagon quilts at the Festival of Quilts and my friends have been making some lovely ones also.  The beautiful quilt below was made by my friend Jenny Manning.

With advice from Jenny I downloaded some ready made sheets of templates from the Internet to save me having to copy them all out.  I found this great website that had all different sizes so I downloaded one and made some photocopies, which I have just cut out as I needed them.

Another bit of advice that Jenny gave me was to just cut out squares of fabric.  this made things much quicker as the fabric could be cut with a rotary cutter.  The extra fabric on the back  could be removed at a later date or just left in.  By just just tacking the fabric on the back of each hexagon and not stitching through there is no need to remove any stitching later.

I went on a trip and took with me some of my Japanese taupe fabrics, and started to make some of these hexagon flowers not knowing where this was going to lead.