comfort quilts for donation

Yes, it's been a while. A long while.

And I've missed writing updates and sharing photos. So I'm going to try to get back in the habit of spending time here :)

My wonderful quilt guild continues to support a local breast cancer care facility with donations of comfort quilts for patients in the surgery phase of their treatment plan.  I set a personal goal for 2017 to donate five quilts, and the first two are finished and on the way to patients.

16-patch quilts are so simple, but the result is always beautiful. The fuchsia, orange, and yellow batiks in this 56" x 70" quilt remind me of a summer sunset. You only need 20 fat quarters to make this large throw sized quilt.  First I cut four strips measuring 4" x 18" from each fat quarter, took two of those strips and paired them with two strips from a different fat quarter, and used this construction method to create one 14" finished block. Repeat nineteen more times and you've got 20 quilt blocks!! This is a great project to take along to a retreat or sew-in because it can be chain pieced without needing to constantly refer to a pattern or directions :)

Fellow guild member Judy C did the freehand longarm quilting on both of the quilts I'm showing you today. She did a marvelous job!

The second quilt was made with fabrics I purchased from another guild member who was destashing fabrics and kits, and it's tough for me to resist a pile of bright, beautiful fabrics at a bargain price! The fabrics were part of a kit to make an entirely different quilt, but I had a new half-hexagon template from Missouri Star Quilt Company begging to be used.  The template is designed to be used with 10" fabric squares (layer cake squares), but you can also use it with fat quarters or yardage.

After cutting all of the half hexagons it took me a few tries to find a layout I liked, but once that was settled the sewing was easy! The sky blue borders are cut from my stash fabric and bring the final size to 55" x 65".

The flowers Judy quilted in the center of each hexagon are the perfect finish :)

The kit even had enough fabric to cobble together a backing and scrappy rainbow binding! Who wouldn't like a quilt backing covered in zinnias?!

In October 2016 our guild members made 31 donation quilts for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and a few of us were lucky enough to deliver the quilts and receive a tour of the facility.  The nurses, doctors, and administrators provide such excellent care to their patients - both physically and emotionally.

Since our 45 member guild began supporting this local care center we've donated over 100 quilts to local women battling breast cancer :)

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 :)

Red Hot Dreamy Hexagons progress

The second UFO that I want to complete this year is my Red Hot Dreamy Hexagons quilt.  Last year I wrote a post about the center medallion of this quilt, but then I put it away for a long while during the time I spent working on the SIL quilts :)

At the end of 2014 this is what the quilt looked like...

The original quilt (from the pattern book Quilt Grandeur) was made in greys and very subtle colors.  To be honest I didn't give this quilt a second thought while looking through the book because "subtle" doesn't usually draw me in.

But a few months later I saw this earth-toned version offered as a class on creativebug.com, and I couldn't stop thinking about it.  I was really intrigued by the English paper pieced (EPP) hexagons appliqued in the center, and this version was obviously brighter.

Pretty soon I started thinking about how a red version might look, and I was off hand-basting and sewing hexagons like mad!  I used the background fabric to choose these shot cotton colors for the hexagon rings, but once I sewed the rings and saw them all together on the background fabric I knew right away that that yellow had to go.

In the second iteration I added the flowers behind a few different rings.  While these colors were an improvement, that one blue ring was the odd man out.

I felt like the hexagon colors were right in this third try with the addition of a second blue and the brighter orange, but I didn't like the green flowers within the top and bottom left rings.

So I replaced the green flowers and arrived at this arrangement for the quilt center medallion  All that rework was worth the effort - I love this final version!  The first border is one of my favorite prints - Paperweight in Paprika - and the cornerstones are cut from the same floral print used in the center of each hexagon ring - Japanese Chrysanthemum in Scarlet.

Each ring was hand-appliqued to a single fussy-cut flower.  The seven hexagon rings were then hand-sewn together at the edges to make one large centerpiece which was hand-appliqued as a whole over the background fabric - Jupiter in Red.  Lots of hand sewing, which I really enjoyed :)

I put this quilt up on the design wall again today so I could finish the second border and get started on the third (there are five total borders).  Based on my goal of completing five UFO quilts before October, my ideal timeline is to complete one quilt top each month January through May to allow time for long arm quilting and binding.  It will be a stretch to finish this one by the end of January, but I'm hopeful!  After all, goals are supposed to be a bit of a stretch, right?

one-block wonder

At 9:00am Saturday morning I started with five yards of this fabric...


and at 3:00pm Saturday afternoon, I had this...


114 paper plates loaded with 3 3/4", 60-degree triangle kaleidoscopes. See them all stacked up there in the top left corner?

The fabric is Alexander Henry "Kebede" purchased online at From Here to Quilternity. Isn't that a great quilt shop name? The class is One-Block Wonder Kaleidoscopes taught at my LQS. I love taking quilting classes; you learn so many little tricks in class that you could never pick up from a book.

I now have four weeks to sew together ALL of these triangles, so that we can arrange them on a design wall at the next class session. While I'm not excited about all that repetitive sewing, I am happy to have a deadline to force me to get it done :)

I've been wanting to make one of these quilts for a long time now, but was too chicken to start it on my own - I wasn't sure I could get all six layers of repeats lined up correctly. Turns out it wasn't that bad - you just need LOTS of flat-head pins!

I'll update you on my progress in the next four weeks. Wish me luck!

back in my happy place

Happiness is a rainbow hexagon pillow...

Just finished this little beauty yesterday, and I'm thinking of re-decorating the entire house around it. Well, not really, but it is HAPPY, yes? I wasn't too sure if I liked the quilting when it was done, but it's growing on me. If I tell you what I originally thought it looked like, then that is all you'd be able to see, and I don't want to spoil it for you. I put the green binding on just like you would for a quilt, mainly because after quilting it I realized it needed another pop of color to set it off from the all white pillow backing. And I added a zipper to the back so it can be washed - think it might need it someday with that white???

This was my first foray into English paper-piecing (before this I had no idea what that even meant) and I really enjoyed the process. I don't think I have the focus necessary to complete an entire quilt made from these hexagons... there are less than 100 in this pillow and that was enough for me. I take my hat off to all the people I see online who are piecing these things by the thousands - you go, girls! But I learned something new, and I have something beautiful to show for it in the end. What could be better?
P.S. I have to give credit to my daughter for suggesting the rainbow layout in the first place. You were right, honey!

I never met a rainbow color layout that I didn't LOVE!

A few years ago I attended the Chicago Flower and Garden Show with my husband. The most captivating display was a huge, undulating bed of annuals and perennials arranged into a living, flowing color spectrum. It was breathtaking! At the time we did not have a digital camera (and who knows where the photos are now?) but apparently the idea has stayed with me and found an outlet in my next quilting project...


While on vacation I managed to get these rainbow-hued hexagons paper-pieced. They are all 1" hexagons, which is the length of each side of the hexagon. So before I left, I cut 2.5" squares from about 100 unique fabrics in my scrap bin and 100 paper hexagon forms that I printed from Melanie at texasfreckles. She has organized a piece-along, and at her blog you can find instructions and templates for different sized hexies. She is planning to make a charm quilt (all unique fabrics) from - get this - 1198 hexagons! Well, I am going to be content with just getting my little group of 90 or so put together for a pillow top. I am usually a strong believer in the motto that "if some is good, then MORE is BETTER", but not in this case. They are cute and fun, and the piecing of these little beauties goes pretty quickly, but I have got way too many things in the backlog pile to commit to any more than this.

I'm planning to put this grouping on a bleached white or snow solid background, do some random quilting, and end up with a fun summer throw pillow. Somewhere on flickr I saw a similar color scheme of hexies on a white background, but arranged more like a flowing bed of flowers on a table runner - BEAUTIFUL! Many of my scrap floral fabrics are from an old Moda line called Wildflowers by Rick Vanderpool. They have found their way into lots of projects at my house - a jelly roll bag, an apron, a hearts stack-and-whack quilt. It will be appearing next in a modified bento box pillow (tutorial at filminthefridge) to go with my hexagon pillow.

Maybe someday I'll get my color-spectrum garden bed, but until then I'll be content with all these lovely quilting projects! ENJOY THE DAY!