Hexie Finish

Oh, goody, I have another finish to share this week. My Hexie Quilt! I had set it aside recently to finish some other projects and chase some squirrels (and to procrastinate in picking a quilting design), but this week it all came together pretty quickly. This morning I ran out to take pictures (in my pajamas!) because the light was right--even overcast--and the wind was calm. Quite a contrast to our bright blue, sunny skies of yesterday and wind gusts as high as 60-some miles per hour. Cuh-ray-zy!! As a result of the wind, there are lots of places without electricity around here today, but we were lucky. Oh, guess I'm off-topic, but the point is that I could get some pictures (that showed the quilting) this morning without blowing away. 

You can see how I made this quilt here, here and here. There are also a few pictures on my Instagram site. If you compare some of those other pictures to the above picture, you can see that I did a little quilt surgery in the improv part of the back to balance colors out a little more after I had the back together. 

For the quilting, I decided on a walking foot design. Due to my shoulder injury, I haven't quilted a biggish quilt since last August, and large-scale FMQ still seems a little too demanding. I was going to divide the quilt diagonally and do four fairly equal quadrants of wavy lines, but then thought it might be more fun to put the diagonals off center. 

I started by using an old tool I haven't had out in awhile--my flexible curve. 

I could have drawn the lines freehand but this helped me visualize what I wanted to do. I used my Chakoner to draw light chalk lines along the flexible curve for my main lines. My walking foot has a guide with it so I used that to space the quilting. 

I did find that doing concave curves (that's the name for the ones that curve in like the bottom of a bowl, right?) with the guide was not real accurate because the guide is somewhat behind the needle instead of next to it. I don't know why that is--maybe because it's meant just for straight lines? Anyway, I learned to mostly eyeball my lines and use the guide as just a guide. Huh, maybe because it is a guide?? They're a little wonky here and there, but I decided from the outset that I would not pick them out if they wobbled. The lines are about 1 inch apart. I had to really restrain myself to not fill in with more lines to make them 1/2 inch apart. I love dense quilting, but I wanted this quilt to be a fast finish and really soft. I had a love/hate relationship with the mint thread I used throughout the quilting--I thought it was too prominent and taking too much attention from the hexies--but in the end, I loved it. I was just viewing it from way too close while sewing. 

I'm really pleased that I didn't have any pulling/distortion with the walking foot. I had really pinned this quilt a lot when I basted it because I didn't know at the time how I was going to quilt it. As I did each line, I moved pins as needed, making a row about 2 inches away from the previous stitching line. This took a bit of time, but it gave my arm a rest so that I could keep working (reaching to the left to rearrange the quilt as I sew is still difficult to do and fatiguing). The pins made a nice tight channel for the quilting. 

I ordered some extra navy print fabric for the binding. I like that it has a diagonal print that looks like bias binding with a little extra interest because of the variations in the print. I'm still working to improve my binding skills. Working on the theory that I tend to stretch my bindings as I attach them (so that the quilt ripples on the edge), I took extra care to make sure that the measurement of the binding matched the length of each side of the quilt. After turning a corner, I measured, then pinned the binding at the next corner and few places along the way.

I stitched it by machine to the front and then whipped it down to the back by hand. 

Here are a few close-ups:

Extreme close-up of my initials and date

And the quilt after washing (sorry, low evening light):

And now for the details about the quilt:

Design: Hexies from a plastic template made to my specifications by a local glass cutter. Longer diameter is about 9 1/4 inches and shorter diameter is a little over 8 inches.

Fabric: Paperie by Amy Sinibaldi for Art Gallery Fabric (mostly won in a giveaway from Hawthorne Threads), plus two aqua prints (one from Hazel line by Cluck Cluck Sew for Windham and the other an unknown to me). Backing is Jules and Coco Flower Garden from Joann.

Binding: Cut 2 inches wide and folded; 1/4 inch wide on front

Threads: Superior Masterpiece in Granite for piecing. Superior King Tut in Mint Julip for the quilting on the front and in Temple in the bobbin. (I considered switching the colors around, but now I'm glad I didn't.) Superior Treasure Hand Quilting in Old Lace for the hand part of the binding. 

Batting: Hobbs Heirloom Premium 80/20 Bleached Cotton

Size: 43 1/2 by 53 inches before washing. 41 1/2 by 50 1/4 inches after machine washing on cold, drying on low.

Pieced on my Singer Featherweight; Quilted on my Singer 115 Treadle with a walking foot.

So what did I learn from making this quilt?

1. Sewing large hexies by machine is a blast!! And much easier than you might think.

2. It's ridiculous for me to agonize so much over the color of quilt thread. In the end it all works out.

3. Over-pin-basting a quilt takes time, but it's worth it.

4. A walking foot guide is really just a "guide" if I'm doing curves. 

5. It's very freeing to not worry about whether quilting lines are accurate and well-spaced.

6 .I can restrain myself from quilting every last half inch of a quilt and still be happy with the result. 

7. Taking time to measure the binding as I attach it seems to help me get a smoother edge.

8. My husband thought the quilting looked like the Piedmont. He remembered seeing pictures in his elementary geography book of the Piedmont area in the southeastern United States. When I looked up images online, I thought the quilting looked more like the Piedmont in Italy. But he's right. It does look like the Piedmont, wherever it is. If I were keeping the quilt, maybe I'd rename it Piedmont.  

8. I am so glad I can quilt again!!

I plan to donate this quilt to Margaret's Hope Chest for the Mother and Baby program at Pine Rest Hospital. It will serve as a hug during therapy for a mother recovering from perinatal mood and anxiety disorder. 

Time to get back to other quilt projects. The only outstanding WIPs I have are both Improvs. Hmmm. I wonder why they are always the last I work on. Lack confidence much?

I'm linking up over the next few days with linky parties at Crazy Mom Quilts, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, My Quilt Infatuation,  Quilt Moderne (TGIFF) and Sew Fresh Quilts. I hope you have had a great quilty week. If you live in my part of the US, I hope the wind didn't blow you away! (And that you still have electricity.)

Deconstructing Coins

I've had some fabric panels for awhile (I think a year!) that Hawthorne Threads sent me along with a giveaway. They are samples of some of their digitally printed collections. They seem to coordinate quite well with each other, and I thought it might be fun to use them together in a quilt. 

Then in the last few weeks, the leaders of the Ad Hoc Improv Quilters, Ann and Kaja of Fret Not Yourself and Sew Slowly introduced the idea of making improv quilts with a Chinese Coins theme. If you look at my panels, you see ready-made coins. I could have just cut them apart and sewed them back together with some sashing, but I decided that it was time to challenge myself to go a little further with some improv piecing. 

The extent of my improv up until now has been mainly to hastily combine leftover quilt top fabric pieces with some yardage to make backs of quilts. And I've always thought of it as a relaxed way to just play with fabric. But I look at the process of other improv quilters and I see a slowly unfolding design with lots of consideration, challenge, and discovery along the way. And I have a feeling that most of these quilts end up very different from what their makers initially envisioned, even when the vision was hazy. So with these fabrics, I'm going to try to slow down and let them take me on what I hope is an new improv adventure. 

I searched my stash of solid fabrics and found quite a few colors that work with the prints.

I supplemented with the new blue fabric you see at the left end (from a local fabric shop) and a new piece of coordinating fabric (smoke--the second solid from the left) from Hawthorne Threads. 

I spent yesterday afternoon "deconstructing" the coins in the panels. They are approximately 5 1/4 inches long by 2 to 3 inches wide. 

Then I slashed some of them and inserted solid strips 1 inch wide (1/2 inch finished).

Notice I have the coins placed vertically for a possible horizontal line of coins. There are quite a few with directional prints, so this makes sense to me right now. I'm trying not to make any hard and fast rules here, though, so we'll see what happens. My first thought was to slash every coin, but then I realized I don't have to do that, at least not yet. (See the third coin in the bottom row--I like it the way it is.) I'm going to do a few more with slashes like this (trying to vary the location of the slash a little more) and then think about what variations I might do and how else I can work in the solids. 

This project has been muddling around in my mind for awhile, but now that I've started sewing, I'm going to try to do a little at a time and stay open to new directions. 

Meanwhile, I'm going to focus on quilting my hexie quilt. I've chosen the quilting thread (leftover from another project) and have narrowed the quilting to two different ideas. I know it will be quilted with my walking foot as FMQ on anything bigger than a mini isn't going to work for me right now. Oh, and I also bought an extra little length of the navy fabric that's in the quilt top to use for binding. I like that it's printed diagonally. I love the look of bias binding, and faux-bias is so much easier for me than the real thing.

Ha, I pin-basted this quilt to the extreme, I guess because I wasn't sure how I was going to quilt it. 

I'm linking up today with Ad Hoc Improv Quilters. You can reach them at either site that I marked above or through the AHIQ button on the right. 

Have a good week, wherever your quilting takes you. 

A Little Improv

It's time to make a quilt back. And that means it's time for a little improv. 

I finished the top of my Hexie Quilt this week. (I'll show it to you some other time, but you can see the layout here.) I wanted to continue the delicate theme so I challenged myself to visit just one store to find some fabric. And I found it. No dithering at all. It took one minute, tops. (Does that have anything to do with the fact that my husband was with me? No! I would have found it that fast all by myself.) And I knew it was the one. But then, of course, I did have to wander the store just a bit to make sure. But I did not waver. Yea, me!

My typical way of buying backing fabric is to buy a bit more than the length of my quilt. That is never enough, because my quilts are always a little too wide to use a simple length. So I fill in a strip somewhere off-center using as much of the leftover fabrics from the front as I can. I don't spend a lot of time with measurements or planning. I just start cutting and sewing in whatever way makes the best use of the scraps. For this quilt, I had one hexagon left from the top, so that was my starting point. I filled in the corners to make a rectangle and then cut long strips from the other fabrics. That seemed to make the best use because there were a lot of longish pieces along the selvages. I cut them the widest I could, and they turned out all fairly close to each other in width even though I didn't measure. I guess it was because they all started as fat quarters with four hexies cut from each. 

I laid them out on the floor with the length of fabric I bought and then shifted them around and cut some into shorter lengths until they looked about right to me. The pieces of the backing fabric will be wider--this is just to get an idea of the look.

I've sewn everything from the hexagon up in the above picture. I trimmed rows to even them up as I joined them, and they were almost exactly (just a smidge over) the width I needed to join them to the hexie rectangle. I'm still in the process of tweaking the placement of the bottom pieces. Here's a close-up of the top section:

And on it's own:

This is as improv as I get. And I love it. I think I've said it before: backs are so fun because I just play with them. There's no "pressure" to get it right the way as I sometimes feel when I'm making a top. I have limited fabric and I just try to use it up. I really do need to try this with a quilt top sometime. 

I'm linking up this week with Ann from Fret Not Yourself for the Ad Hoc Improv Quilters linky party (it came at just the right time to share this tiny bit of improv) and with Sew Fresh Quilts for Let's Bee Social. Have a fun quilty week, improv or not. 

Hexie Love

Hello, everyone. No more dithering here. For this quilt, anyway. Thanks for all of your input after my post last week. It was fun to read your opinions. Here's the arrangement I chose. It's pretty much the layout that got the most "votes" with just a couple of tweaks. Still low light for picture taking. January. Sigh.

I had started thinking that was the layout shortly after I hit the "publish" button, so of course I was pleased that a lot of you agreed with me. I still like the layout with the line of dark hexies down the side, but I was having some trouble with the distribution of those hexies given the assortment I had available. Maybe the darker coral hexies I rejected early-on will find themselves with some partners in that layout in another quilt. I feel like I've learned a lot about what I might want to put with them. 

When I put pictures on Instagram of what I was working on, I got a couple of comments about the construction. Sewing hexies by machine can be intimidating because it's basically a lot of Y-seams, which can be off-putting for a lot of quilters. Let's not call them Y-seams. That will help. And using large-sized hexies probably makes it easiest. Sewing hexies together by machine is pretty much the way quilters years ago sewed Grandmother's Flower Garden quilts by hand. (I'm sure some people still do--when they're not doing English Paper Piecing.) When sewing by hand, you don't cross seam allowances, and this is the same technique. I'm not going to explain the whole process here, but there are lots of tutorials online that show how to do this, and I encourage you to check them out. The ones I'm most familiar with are Jacquie's at Tallgrass Prairie Studios and Lorna's at Sew Fresh Quilts. There are also some good videos if you look around online. Each does the process slightly differently from the others. After reading several sources, I did what felt best for me, using tips from more than one. 

One of the things I did that helped me start and stop seams easily was to draw little registration marks on the diagonals. 

Close up

When sewing a hexie quilt, you first sew the columns and then join them together. Here I have the first two columns joined. I'm doing the joins as I go. 

Look how neat those corners come out! And they haven't even been pressed. (That gets done after it's all put together.)

Anyway, I'm having tons of fun. I'm taking my time sewing one seam at a time instead of using shortcuts like chaining, but that's most comfortable for me right now and keeps me from getting sloppy. 

I did take time out for a couple of other things this week. On the top of my rehabbing shoulder, I have a muscle that wants to take over and do all the work. Sometimes it gets pretty tight and sore, so I made a new rice bag heating pad that I can drape over my shoulders while I sew. It has lots of channels so it bends easily. Here's how it looks naked:

And here it's in its pillow case on Teddy. Isn't he a cute model? 

I also spent an evening de-papering the quilt top that I made for the  Autumn Abundance blog hop hosted by Needle and Foot. One step closer to a finish. 

I'm linking up today with Sew Fresh Quilts for Let's Bee Social. 

Have a good quilting week, and if you haven't machine sewn big hexies, consider trying them yourself. They're fun, and not hard at all.

Dither!

Hey, everybody, I found my word for the year! Dither! Kidding. I don't pick a word for the year. But if I did, it would definitely be "Dither!" this year. Because that's what I've been doing. I've always been indecisive. This happens with everything--clothing, paint colors, furnishings, quilt designs, fabrics, you name it. I could go on and on. I usually say something like this: "I don't know what I want, but I'll know it when I see it." And when I like something, I like it forever. The problem is that when I don't "see it," I spend lots of time trying to make up my mind about what to do. Dithering. 

Which takes us to today.

I started a new quilt this week from a fat quarter bundle of fabric I won in a Hawthorne Threads giveaway quite awhile ago (plus a few other fat quarters). If you look at this picture, you see the Paperie line by Amy Sinibaldi for Art Gallery Fabrics. Part of the reason I love this line is because there are no repeating patterns. The extras are the dark coral and darker aqua (Hazel line by Cluck Cluck Sew for Windham Fabrics), and the lighter aqua/white and a little leaf print, which are both mysteries to me because I didn't have the printed selvages. Anyway, I thought I'd add those extras in to add a pop of color to a light palette. I loved them all, especially the coral fabric.

I knew when I got the bundle that I wanted to make a hexagon quilt, not English paper pieced, but machine sewn. I wanted the hexagons to be large enough to make the best use of the fat quarters without much waste. I drew the size I wanted, then took my pattern to my local window/screen repair place and asked the owner to cut a template for me from acrylic. He seemed a little hesitant about making such precise cuts, but he did agree to do it. It turned out fine and made it easy for me to rotary cut the hexagons. 

If you look closely, you can see the clear template on top of the fabric. It's a little over 8 inches on one diameter and about 9 1/4 on the longer diameter. I was able to cut four from each fat quarter. 

Then it was time to figure out how to lay out the hexies. I didn't want to spend hours at the design wall, so I printed out some hexie grid paper and brainstormed options. I have a huge box of colored pencils, but was really surprised to find that I didn't have coral or aqua ones. Weird! So I dug up some old crayons leftover from my kids' school days. I kind of wanted an unplanned asymmetrical look, although you see I did try out a symmetrical one in the lower right corner. Here are some of of my ideas:

Eventually I chose two possible designs and started putting up the fabrics on the wall. (I've cropped the photos here so you can see how the quilt would look with the trimmed hexies along the edges.)

It quickly became apparent to me that the darker coral wasn't going to work at all. I was bummed because it was one of my favorite fabric pieces. I thought it would sort of pop with some of the other fabrics, which had a bit of the same color in them. Instead, it looked garish. Not what I wanted in a delicate little quilt. In addition, I did not like how it looked with the darker aqua because they had the same print, which grabbed all of the attention from the sweet little prints in the Paperie line. Not only that, but the little leaf print just didn't fit in. I tried it both right side up and wrong side up, but it just wasn't working. 

It looked fine to my eye, but when I took pictures, it really stood out. I finally rejected it. I'm not going to show you all the variations I tried with these fabrics. But I can say that I was seriously bummed that I wasn't "seeing it" when I laid out all my lovely fabrics.

I spent hours throwing hexies up on the wall, dithering all the while. So much for saving time by coloring the grid paper. I finally did keep the two extra aquas, but otherwise used only fabrics from the Paperie line. So. What to do. I've decided to show you what I came up with and see which you like better. I'm sorry about the quality of these photos. The weather's been grayer than gray here, and it's dark in the house. I tried photos with my phone, my Ipad and my husband's camera with the flash, but none of them turned out sharp. The color is pretty true though. Which do you think might appeal to someone more? (This quilt will be a donation quilt that will be given to a young woman.) This?

Or this?

Oh, and while I was writing this, I suddenly decided that I needed to give the more symmetrical arrangement a fair try, too, with a few tweaks:

As I said, I've always been a ditherer. But lately when it comes to quilt-making, I'm a champion ditherer. I think it might be partly because I don't have the ability right now to easily change things while sewing when they don't work out the way I hoped. 

So help me out here. What do you all think?? Any other suggestions?

I'm linking up this week with Sew Fresh Quilts and My Quilt Infatuation for their linky parties. The buttons are on the right side bar. 

See you next week, hopefully with some sewing done and much better photos. Have a good quilting week, and please, try not to dither as much as I do.