Hexagon Bug - 9

The Hexagon quilt hanging in our Market Square Quilters Exhibition in April. It could do with a little more quilting around the edge.

The quilt being basted ready to hand quilt.

Detail of the centre section.

Winter Wall Hanging 4

My wall hanging is really coming together now.

The last corner to be attached.

The hanging is now assembled and ready to layer and quilt.  I am going to machine quilt first and then add some hand embroidery and embellishments for extra interest.

Winter Wall hanging 3

The wall hanging is really coming together as small areas are being completed and sown together.

The area above shows the cut pieces ready to sew for a section  and below they are stitched and placed into position.

Winter Wall Hanging 2

After the embroideries were sown out on my sewing machine,  I added them to the design wall and my chart informed me how many inches I still had to fill with squares.

Some more embroideries.

Winter Panel Wallhanging 1

I have an area in my hall on which I like to hang a wall hanging for each season and I was missing one for Winter.  At the Festival of Quilts I bought a Scandinavian Folk panel which I thought I could customise.  I could have made the whole hanging from scratch but I am very short of time.

I cut out the blocks and placed them on my design wall for inspiration. I cut out a few small squares to test them for colour.

Each panel was  10 inches square and so after I measured the size of the finished hanging, I cut out some 10  inch squares and did a rough plan of where they would positioned.

I rearranged the panel blocks  and then started working in the spaces with small squares.  I wanted to keep the colour palette simple with grey, white, red and pink.

I wanted some of the blocks to look like red work and so I searched through my embroidery patterns on my embroidery unit for any that might be suitable.  I didn't want any Christmas ones as I would like to have the option of hanging the quilt all Winter.

Some designs were sown out with red thread, some with grey and others in white to add variety.

Hexagon Bug - 8

I attached the last border to the quilt center and decided to see what happened at the corners of the quilt before deciding how I was going to tackle them. The hexagon shapes create the two opposite ends the same, and the other two opposite ends the same but different from the other ones.

I decided that the corners needed to be be more pointy and added an extra blue and pink flower in each. I trimmed back the border edge on two opposite borders so that each border was 5 inches away from the applique.

I folded the fabric until a mitre was created to meet the corner of the borders and mid point on my blue added flowers.  This creates a wierd angle but I think looked the neatest. I hand stitched the mitres and later trimmed off the excess fabric.
What next!

Hexagon Bug - 7

I made and sewed on a row of light brown hexagons inside my border to hide any gaps along the edge of the background fabric.  I  used  light brown so that there would not be a strong line around the edge.

I tacked and then appliqued the border onto the background fabric.

I am going to applique the outer edge of the border onto this beige fabric and mitre the edges.  This might take some time!

Hexagon Bug - 6

I wanted to make sure that the background fabric was covered and to add some more interest to the quilt border, so made some extra  blue hexagons.  On two of the sides I only needed one hexagon to fill the space and on the other two sides I needed two.

I am still not satisfied with the border and want to add some more pieces.  This might take a while!

Hexagon Bug - 5

When I reached the point where I needed to go around the corner, I realised that my design would not intersect and I had to redesign the side edges so that they would fit.

It took me quite  while to make all of the pieces and I had to add an extra large hexagon flower to two of the sides to make the design work.

Once I laid the border over the quilt centre I realise that I need to add some more pieces inside so that the edges of the background will be covered. 

Hexigans Bug - 4

I decided that I would make a border around the edge of the quilt and liked this arrangement.

The Hexagon Bug - 3

To make the centre of the quilt larger I decided to make some small flowers to put all around the edge of my hexagons, with  single pink hexagons to fill in the spaces left.

I tried different coloured backgrounds on which to sew the centre of the quilt and settled on this dark grey. It is strange how quilts develop a life of their own and dictate what they need next.

Himani being a typical cat wanted to get in on the act, though after settling down for a good fuss is not sure about my I pad looking at her!

The Hexagon Bug - 2

After making lots of hexagon flowers I decided it was time to start sewing some together.  I  laid some of them on the floor to plan how I would place them and decide if I needed to make any fillers. 

I sewed all the centre pieces together and then played around with some coloured hexagons to find the right colour combination for the next round. 

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.