mystery medallion 2016

The Crystal Lake Modern Quilt Guild is sponsoring a new challenge this year - a Mystery Medallion program where we each create a quilt center block of any size to start and add a border each month for the next five months. The fun (or challenging) part is that no one knows what the requirements for each of the five borders will be; they are revealed month by month. So no planning or scheming ahead of time - just jump in and make it work each month!

My quilt center is an English Paper Pieced (EPP) star on a background of "made fabric" (a bunch of low volume scraps sewn together), and it measures 22.5" square.  The star is machine appliqued to the background with a short straight stitch around the outside edge.

The background fabrics were left over from blocks I made for a quilt shop sample in 2014; it hung there as a sample for quilt kits they were selling, and after that I'm not sure where it ended up. The "plus" blocks were made from a pattern found here.  I really did love it, so one day soon I'll have to make another and keep it for myself (adds yet another project to the much too long already project list.)

The hexagons in my quilt center were made even before 2014 when I was first learning how to EPP one spring break vacation in Florida. I was never sure what to do with them, and at one point they were sewn together in rows. Maybe I was planning to put them on some pillows? Who knows!

But sometime last year I saw a photo of a star made from hexagons so I took the rows apart, and sewed them into the large star shape composed of 73 hexagons. So the star and the background piece have been hanging around on the design wall for quite some time just waiting to be used in a project.

The whole point of a Mystery Medallion Challenge is to let go of control and practice your design and color skills each month when the new border requirements are revealed. At our meeting last weekend we learned that January's border must include snowball blocks and use the color red violet.

RED VIOLET?! Sweet - one of my favorite colors, and I happen to have lots of it in my stash.  I gathered a few fat quarters that were primarily red violet, tossed in a couple more that were primarily yellow (but still contained pink/violet), added a stack of more low volume scraps, and started cutting.

Since my center square measured 22.5" I needed to add a "spacer" border to increase the size to 24.5" in order to accommodate the 4" snowball blocks I planned.  This Peppered Cotton in Fog by Studio E has just enough contrast to set it apart from the backgrounds, but it doesn't overwhelm and grab all the attention.  It was cut at 1.5" width to finish at 1".

The 28 snowball blocks are each 4" finished, so now the quilt center measures 32.5".  I cut each center of the snowballs at 4.5" square and each corner background fabric at 1.75" square.  You can find a handy tutorial for making snowball blocks here.  Mine look more like stop signs (I probably should have made the corner pieces smaller) but whatever - I love how it's turned out!

Even if you aren't a member of CLMQG, you can follow along and make your own Mystery Medallion quilt.  Each month the new border requirements will be posted on our website, and photos of members' progress can be found on our Facebook page.

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!

slow sewing steady progress

25 done, 7 to go...

The flower garden blocks are nearly all complete! All of the fabrics have been chosen and cut, so now it's just a matter of sticking with it. I usually sneak in a bit of hexie sewing time on my Monday morning coffee talks with Thing 2 :)

My quilt guild has been hosting a couple of evening meet ups each month for hand sewers (again at Starbucks) so that provides another opportunity for progress.

The background hexies aren't nearly as exciting as the flowers, but I've got about 40% of those sewn together. I'm using a coloring chart to keep track of the sections; this should make it easier to put the whole thing together when all the components are finished!

I don't have a count of how many background hexies are basted and ready to go, but there is a bag full.  And on a recent evening in a fit of paper-punching madness I punched out 622 foundation paper hexagons. Carpal tunnel, here I come!!

Some of these counts are "best-guess"...

• Center Star Colored Hexagons completed: 151/151 (100%)
• Flower Colored Hexagons completed: 475/608 (78%)
• Grey Background Hexagons completed (guessing): 218/532 (40%)
• Total Hexagons completed: 874/1291 (67.6%)

You can read more about the method I use to English Paper Piece (EPP) these hexagons and see the project pattern in this post.  Previous progress updates can be viewed here.

I'm a little shocked at how diligently I've managed to stick with this project.  I hope my persistence continues!!

slow sewing update

17 done, 15 to go...

I've passed the halfway point in making these hexagon flower garden blocks!  All of those background minutes spent waiting at doctors' offices and in front of the TV in the evenings have added up to great progress on this quilt.

It's still very much a long term project, but Kaffe, Amy Butler, Anna Maria Horner, Juliana Horner, Denyse Schmidt, and Art Gallery are all providing me with bright, beautiful colors to build these flowers a handful of hexagons at a time.

My hexagon papers and fabrics will be joining me on a road trip in a couple of weeks as my family heads out for our summer vacation.

Maybe I'll try to work on the grey background patches during that trip.  There are oh-so-many of them needed, and I don't want to save them all until the end.

In my previous post I said I wasn't going to use a count to track my progress, but I couldn't resist!

• Center Star Colored Hexagons completed: 151/151 (100%)
• Flower Colored Hexagons completed: 323/608 (53%)
• Grey Background Hexagons completed: 49/532 (9%)
• Total Hexagons completed: 523/1291 (40.5%)

You can read more about the method I use to English Paper Piece (EPP) these hexagons and see the project pattern in this post.

flower garden hexagons = slow sewing

Confession: Late in 2014 I started yet another hand sewing project.  At the time I was having such fun making the English paper pieced (EPP) hexagons for my Red Hot Dreamy Hexagons quilt top (which by the way is finished and just waiting to be quilted!) that I immediately started making more when I saw this book cover...

I'm using primarily Kaffe Fassett and Anna Maria Horner fabrics to make my star and flowers and a wide variety of light-to-medium grey prints for the background hexagons. The center star of the quilt top is almost complete!

The pattern calls for 759 colored hexagons (to make the star center and surrounding flower blocks) and 532 background hexagons!  Wow - that is a LOT of hand-sewing!!  I haven't yet made a count of how many are completed because I don't want to discourage myself, but I plan to show you my (slow) progress on this throughout the year.

The great news is that this project is perfectly portable - I've worked on these hexagons while traveling in Florida, Indiana, Texas, and Ohio and in front of the TV many evenings.  You only need to bring along a small bag of precut templates, precut fabric squares, needle, thread, small scissors, and reading glasses while you're on the go :)

I use a 1" Fiskars hexagon punch to cut my EPP papers.  I am way too cheap to buy enough EPP papers for a project of this size, so I cut my papers from the subscription inserts found in magazines.  FREE EPP papers, people!  Using a hole punch tool to make a hole in the center of each paper makes them easy to remove later.

A few of my fabrics were cut using a 1.25" hexagon die and my new Sizzix Fabi Cutter, but I found that they were a little too small to easily wrap around the papers, so I've gone back to my original method of using 2.5" fabric squares for 1" hexagons. (The 1" measurement indicates the length of each side of the hexagon.)  There is a 1.5" hexagon die available for the Sizzix Fabi, but I'm too cheap to buy another die when 2.5" squares work just fine :)

As you can see, there is not a lot of seam allowance on the back side of these EPP hexagons - too fiddly for me.  The method I use for thread basting my hexagons is actually a mash-up of several methods, but this YouTube video is the closest demonstration I can find online to show you how I do it.  I don't glue baste my hexagons - I tried that method but it just didn't work for me.  Thread basting takes longer, but thread is cheaper than glue and it stays in place just fine.

Along with the star center I've completed four of the 32 flower units...

This photo shows the back of the center star unit. You can see that I've removed the papers from all of the hexagons that are surrounded by others.  The perimeter hexagons still have their papers enclosed; I don't remove the paper until a hexagon has been sewn to another on all six sides.  You can also see that the green and black hexagons do not have any thread basting.  These are the ones I tried to glue baste, but the seam allowances didn't remain glued down long enough for me to sew them all together, so I ended up re-gluing all of them.  What a waste of time!

And here are the back sides of my flower units. I'll leave all the basting stitches in even after the whole top is put together. There really is no reason to spend the time removing all those stitches - they'll just be concealed on the back side against the batting and won't interfere with the quilting process.

And one last shot of the center...

This is going to be a very lengthy project. I hesitate to even venture a guess at a completion date, so for now I'll just plan to write an update periodically and maybe at some point provide a count of how many of the 1,291 hexagons are completed.  But that would require counting.  And I'd rather just spend the time sewing :)