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Tuesday, January 26, 2016

major milestone

I have finished English paper piecing (EPP) and sewing all of the main components of my Grandmother's Flower Garden hexagon quilt!  There are 32 flower clusters, 6 star points, and 19 groups of background hexagons.  The empty spaces between sections will be filled with additional background hexagons as I sew the segments together.


The final seven flower clusters were completed earlier in January.


And last weekend I decided on a final layout which was transferred to a new coloring diagram.  Now all the flowers and background segments are numbered to make it clear which pieces go where as I sew them together into larger sections.


It's a bit tricky handling these larger pieces as I sew them together, so I've divided the diagram into six sections which I'll piece together before joining them all into one large quilt center.  Not exactly a portable project for much longer!  I've selected and purchased a border fabric, but I haven't yet decided on what the border design will be - maybe more hexagons!  For now I'm concentrating on keeping my momentum so this does not become another UFO ;)

More hexagon stats:

  • Center Star hexagons complete; 151/151
  • Flower hexagons complete: 608/608
  • Background hexagons complete: 532/532
  • Total hexagons complete: 1,291/1,291
  • Weeks since starting this project: 71 (wow!)
Anyone else out there working on a long-term hand sewing project?  A big challenge right now is where to store all of these pieces while they're being sewn together - ziploc bags aren't cutting it any longer!

2 comments:

  1. Wow, that is a major milestone, Shelley! How lovely! I'm working on a hexie quilt (and have been for a few years now) with over 3,000 hexies, if memory serves me correctly - just hand piecing them, not paper piecing - and am loving every minute of it. I call it Minnie but it's a pattern from a Welsh quilt museum (http://rie-quiltbee.blogspot.ca/search/label/Minnie). I've been using scrapbooking containers but it's getting to the point that they will soon be too small. You almost need those under-the-bed storage boxes - they are low and wide. Might be a thought.

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  2. Congrats on your progress!
    Have a long term handwork project: yes. "Working on": um, it's sitting in a bin, where it's been for far too long. No promises on when I'll get back to it, but the longer it sits in a bin, the more I look forward to finally finishing it. Possibly by the end of this year???

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