By Popular Request

Well, as many of you already know, those hexagon quilts that were in yesterday's post are each created out of one fabric that is sliced and diced and rearranged so that equilateral (60 degree) triangles that have the same repetition of the fabric design are put together. This particular style is shown in a book called One Block Wonders. I don't have the book but have been making hexagons for a long time and enjoy the design opportunities when you have to put all these busy blocks together. People always want to see the fabric that was used to create these quilts so I did manage to find a few small pieces that I hadn't cut up! Each of the pieces is about 14 inches by 22 inches which is approximately the width of the repeat of the design.

The above fabric is the yellow and lavender quilt in the last blog posting. Here is a closeup of one block in that top so you can see the hexagon.

This is the fabric for the mostly pink, green and yellow quilt on the last post. Below is a closeup of one of the blocks in that quilt. Can you pick out where on the fabric this piece was cut from?
This is the red, green and white that I called "U Are There" in the last post.

My approach is to find the repeat of the design and let that determine how big the triangles are. If the repeat is 14 inches (along the length of the fabric), then I will most like use either 4 inch wide strips or 3 inch wide strips as they both divide into 14 comfortably. After the repeats are all cut from the fabric, I carefully pin all the layers together (six layers), then cut strips. After the strips are cut, I use my ruler and lay it down so that I am cutting diamonds the same width as the fabric strip. Then I cut these in half to make two sets of triangles.

When I am putting the triangles together, I try all three variations (different points to the middle). I don't try to always have one straight edge on the outside or in the middle. So each pile of six triangles can made potentially 3 different blocks. Occasionally I have had duplicate stacks of triangles (unusual but it does happen). I just use a different positioning of the triangles and you get two very different looking blocks! As there are bias edges, I don't iron a lot until the end and use finger pressing wherever I can.

I am also about to cut into the following three fabrics that I dyed a couple of months ago. The fabric is the knit pfd fabric from Dharma which I have had forever. It dyed beautifully!! Each piece shown is about 30 inches by 36 inches and is half the width of the piece. I am going to fussy cut to get the best designs for these tshirts for my granddaughter.

This is a very traditional basket quilt which is the result of a block exchange I participated in three years ago. I finally got some borders on (boring) and will actually attempt to maybe do some hand quilting which I really enjoy. I will probably do some machine quilting as well. I like hand quilting the large open areas and then machine quilting the stitch in a ditch stuff. I mix these techniques a lot. This is about 65 x 80 so will make a nice bed quilt when done. I probably would have rearranged these a little better but not worth taking it undone at this point!