I’ve done most of the blues and now I’m fossicking around for more colours. I do have several fat quarters I’ve purchased over the last few weeks so I’ll prep them as well.

Lots and lots of blue, with occasional other colours to maintain my sanity.

I have done a few more that haven’t been photographed yet so I am over the halfway point. Thanks to my sewing friend Sue I’m being supplied with additional cardboard for templates so I can leave them all basted until the end, which will make arranging them in value order much easier. I have also found a box that is just the right size for storing them.

Here is my latest batch of hexagon flowers. I was going to wait until the end of the month but then I realised I’d have four sets instead of three and I don’t like the way WordPress arranges four (or five) images in a gallery. You’d think that it would be easy to make the computer arrange a set of four as 2 x 2, but apparently not.

I’m not all that keen on using striped or geometric fabrics for hexagon flowers, but the two in the centre set (hexagons 141 and 143) work quite well.

I’m also amused by how neatly the values approach a normal distibution — I convert the images to black and white and assign a value from 1 (very light) to 5 (very dark) to each flower. After 153 hexagons the distribution is 15 – 37 – 45 – 36 – 14. Depending on how things look at the end I may take out a few of the very lightest and acquire some more very dark, otherwise the quilt will appear to have mostly light and medium fabrics with one or two rows of very dark around the edge, as the diagram shows.

I’ve been a bit slow the last couple of weeks due to other commitments, but here are 36 more hexagons to bring the total to 108 (I need 365).

I don’t know why the gallery tool always has to make one image larger instead of arranging them 2 x 2 — I’ll have to try and remember to upload in sets of three in future.

As you can see from the images, I have exhausted the scrap drawers and am now working my way through the colour drawers, so there will be less colour variation within sets from now on.

I’ve also bought a couple more blacks so now I have the required 14 (actually 13, since rings 1 and 2 will use the same fabric). I still like the idea of arranging the hexagons with lights in the middle and darks around the edge, so I took the black fabrics and tried to arrange them in value order. It was interesting to compare the fabrics as they are versus how they look in black and white — some of them appear slightly blue under the flash (I also had some that had a brownish tone but I removed them completely).

Ignore the large smudge at upper left — I have cleaned the camera lens since then.

It took a few tries, checking with the camera, but this is the probable order (except that I will swap 4 and 5):

The fabric marked X is lovely but I don’t have enough of it so if I use it at all it will be for borders and / or binding.

I have started to assemble the modules for Flame Rose, my second Penrose tile quilt, but it’s got the stage where I need a large clean surface to lay things out so that I can work out what units I need to make for the corners and I don’t have that at the moment, so it’s in abeyance until after I move to Tasmania.

Since I can’t live without a hand project I’ve decided to make a hexagon quilt. Yes, a hexagon quilt. Now this may not seem like a momentous decision to anyone reading this, but to me it’s a complete about-face from when I started quilting almost forty years ago. In the eighties, mosaic piecing* was so old-fashioned and “quaint” that the very thought of basting around templates and stitching them together was enough to make me feel nauseated. My first quilting class was, of course, the standard twelve-block sampler quilt (we’d call it a “skill builder” today), and hexagons made up one of the blocks. Needless to say, I never finished the quilt.

While the plan for the sampler quilt has long since disappeared, you can get a general idea of the style from this book cover, although it doesn’t have hexagons or baby blocks:

Hexagons have been popular for several years now — I know that many people have made Grit Kovacs’ La Passion pattern and there are some amazing hexagon projects on the web if you search for them. My sewing friend Sue has also done a wall quilt from 2″ hexagons that looks great. In my craft video binge a couple of weeks ago I came across several hexagon projects and decided that — surprising at it might seem — I would start one of my own.

There are several options for glues and template materials so I decided that I would buy as many different brands as I could find and evaluate them. All fabrics are coming from the stash and will not include any batiks, just solids for the centres and prints for the petals. I’m using 1″ hexagons so the flowers are roughly 6″ across.

I’m still waiting on my last shipment of templates in order to finalise the analysis, but here are the first 27 blocks (I will need at least 181). You can click on the images to get a larger version if you want to see more fabric details.

As you can see, my fabrics are heavily skewed to purple and teal. I blame the 90s.

* The Quilters’ Guild of the UK has recommended that the term “mosaic piecing” be used in place of “English paper piecing” since it’s not geographically restricted to England and people use other template materials besides paper.