It's been a while...

My First Batch

I have been rather busy lately. I've made other things besides hexagons lately (a pencil case, a crafty secret santa gift) and I MISS IT.

I made a pencil case!

I think it turned out rather well.

A couple of weeks ago I wanted another pencil case to cary writing utensils and whatnot around in my purse. It's a large-ish purse, and things can get lost in it. It is also an awesome purse, and I don't want it getting marked up by my pens and pencils and whatnot. Hence, the search for a new pencil case began! 

Here is my rubric for grading potential cases:

Size: small case > large case

Shape: square = round > flat

Pattern: cute > ugly

My etsy search helped me figure out exactly what I wanted. 

These two cases earned the highest grades:

I found great tutorials for both of these designs too!

The boxy pencil case tutorial can be found here and the round pencil case tutorial is here. 

I ended up going with the boxy design because it required less detail work (I am new at this, after all) and required buying one thing less. So I picked out my fabrics last night while I was sorting everything and putting together my scrap packs.

All in all, it took me about an hour and a half to make from start to finish.  I got to work with interfacing for the first time, I learned what a zipper foot for a sewing machine is, and I successfully slip stitched! Except for one flaw, it turned out just the way it was supposed to.

the right end

the wrong end

Oops.

Extras

One of the benefits of making a hexagon charm quilt is all the extra fabric you have laying around. In one of the scrap packs I got from etsy was this heavyweight fabric. It was much thicker than the rest of my quilt fabrics. I was worried about how that would affect the quilt, so I set it aside, uncertain of what to use it for.
Until yesterday!
I don't know where my travel mugs are, so I got another one at Kohl's (50% off! yeah!). I love this style of mug, but that image on the insert? bleh.
Since the mug was was already customizable, I just pulled out both layers (the 'friends are awesome' one and the throw-away one with the generic friends) and used one as a template for cutting my fabric. The fabric is thicker and stiffer than most, so it stands up (literally) inside the mug.
I love the contrast of the metal rings and the softness of the fabric inside. And the colors are awesome too! Yay for extra fabric!

I'm tempted to go back to Kohl's and get a lot more to customize and sell (on my new etsy store, which is admittedly rather blah right now). But I'm worried about copyright and legal issues. Any advice on that front?

Step 6: Make HOW MANY hexagons?!

I have now made 248 hexagons.

Ta daa!

I have them all lined up in a large bowl for Halloween Candy.  (I like the monsters on it, so I'm OK with using this bowl for the foreseeable future to hold my work in progress.)  They look rather substantial in there, all squeezed into a ring. Two hundred and forty-eight hexagons.  And soon, I'll have 325.  That's something for a month of on-and-off quilting!

Care to guess how many hexagons I need for my quilt?

Nope, more than that.

According to this VERY useful calculator, I need 1165 hexagons to make a quilt for my Queen size bed. And that's just for the quilt TOP.  If I wanted to make the whole thing out of hexagons (top + the sides that drape down the bed), I'd need 2094.

Now that I have purchased/traded enough fabric to cut out 325 squares of different(ish) fabric, and now that I have made more than 200 hexagons, I have a better idea of the process and what the finished quilt might look like. And I've been thinking about how it would make my room look if I used it as a bedspread type quilt.  I am confident that I will like the final product, but not confident that I will want it to be the focal point of my bedroom.  Because that's what it would be, right? All spread out flat on my large bed in a (presumably) not so large room?

So for the sake of my wallet, my lower back (fabric cutting marathon = owie!), and the actual use I expect to get out of the finished quilt, I have decided to change my plan slightly.  My goal is no longer to make a quilt for my bed out of this project.  I now aim to make a throw-blanket-type-quilt. The kind you would drape on the back of a couch when you're not snuggled up in it on a rainy Fall afternoon. The kind that might have matching pillows (another project!). And the kind that would only take 745 hexagons to make.

I feel good about this decision. I can't wait to see how the change ups my percentages in the progress bars on my blog!

Step 5: Travel kit

If I'm going to finish any time in the next decade, I need to be able to treat hex-making like I treated my homework in elementary school.
Do a little here and there and you don't have any to do at home.

No wait.

I'll still have more to do at home.  But I do need to be able to work on my quilt when work is slow at my one job, or when my students are taking a test at my other job, or when my tutoree is taking a long time to work thorught a problem.

So I made a travel kit. One of the blogger-ladies I found when I was doing my research talked about making a travel kit for a long airplane ride and family vacation.  She took over 100 with her and made 90 on the flight to Hawaii. She hot-glued magnets to the side to hold the pins, and had fabric and paper hexagons and pins and thread and needles and a fancy little needle threader and everything!

I am not planning a trip to Hawaii any time soon, so mine didn't need to be as big. Just big enough to get me throught the down time at work. So I went to a home goods type store and got myself a little snap lock container and filled it up. I tried the hot glue thing, but the little snippers I have kept pulling it off. I gave up on the magnets actually sticking to the side.

But I love my little travel kit! It holds everything I need for a day out and fits quite well into my (admitedly large-ish) purse!
Ta da!

milestone! again!

200 hexagons!
200 useable hexagons!
I have runner's high right now! Except about hand crafted housewares!

Milestone!

Today I managed to get 36 hexagons basted at work. Then when I was tutoring, I did 5 more. And with that 41st hexagon of the day, I used up all the fabric in my carry case and my first spool fo thread!

So after work, I went back to the store and got three more spools.

Step 4: Basting

If you do enough searching online, you will find more fabric basting tutorials than you know what to do with.  And they all seem a little bit different. And now I'm going to add to it with my little tutorial on basting hexagons for English Paper Piecing. I'm only partially sorry.
The point here is to attach a piece of fabric to a piece of paper of a set size and shape quickly so that you can do it over and over again to make a pile of hexagons that are all the same size and shape.  Then you attach the hexagons together, take out the paper, and, you know, make a quilt.  Here is what I have come up with for my basting process after making a dozen dozen hexagons.

Step 1: Pin a paper hexagon to a piece of fabric.

I am using 1.25" hexagons and 3" squares of fabric. That leaves a quarter-inch seam allowance at the two tips closest to the edge of the fabric.

Step 2: Tie a knot in your thread, which should be a very bright, contrasting color so that you can see it later to cut it out. Fold one edge of the fabric over the paper and go through the fabric AND the paper near the bottom corner of your folded fabric.

The pin makes things a bit awkward, so I always start near it, but on the right side. That way, as I go counter clockwise around the hexagon, I will avoid the pin for as long as possible.

Step 3. Fold the fabric again over the next edge of the hexagon.  I have started using the needle to make a clean crease. Ta da!

Step 4: Pass the needle back through the fabric at the next corner.  Your thread should now go nearly the length of one side of the hexagon and now be back on the side of the fabric with the paper. Make sure that there are no snags.

Step 5: Continue around the entire circumference of the hexagon. If you do one stitch per side, you will now have 3 large stitches per side and your needle will come out on the "right" side of the fabric.  As I pull the needle out the last time, I pass it under the first stitch and then back through the loop for a quick knot. Like so:

Step 6: Tighten the knot, snip the thread, and viola! A hexagon!

Now, repeat about a thousand times and then make a quilt.

Step 3: Cutting fabric

I have a confession to make: I went shopping again today.

In my defense, I did need to get some specific supplies for some Christmas presents I'm making, and there was a coupon, and I still didn't have a seam ripper. And there was a fabric sale. Oh the fabric.

While I was there, with my 20% off coupon, I went ahead and got more blades for my 28mm rotary cutter. Even though my 45mm rotary cutter is on the way. I was anxious to get back to cutting. My first rotary blade apparently got a ding in it. Dings = bad. Super bad. But a working rotary cutter is, to borrow a phrase from Juno, totally boss.

Tonight, I cut 184 3" squares of fabric. My back and neck are sore.

Later, I plan on figuring out how many different fabrics I have. Or at least how many squares could look like different fabrics. That's all that really counts. right?

Now I need to grade some papers. Somebody's gotta earn the money to pay for all this fabric, right?

Step 2: Buy stuff

Once I decided to make a quilt and I settled on the format, it was time to start buying stuff. Due to my living situation right now, I have no earthly idea where my tiny sewing kit is. I mean, I know that it is in storage and I could point to it's location (within 5 meters) on a map, but I don't know exactly which box of 80 it is in. So I decided to start a sewing kit from scratch. I spent a couple of hours at Joanne Fabric and built up my stores. Over a few trips to various shops, interspersed with research online, I procured:

• containers for my fabric and for my notions
• bright orange 100% cotton thread for the basting
• white 100% cotton thread for the piecing
• a rotary cutter (with which I have had trials) and a self-healing mat...or two
• size 9 sharps
• straight pins
• those sideways thread snippers that my mom has in blue and I love the feel of
• a pin cushion
• a general book on quilting
• magnets

I also went a little crazy with the fabric.

Can you believe I thought about doing a Christmas quilt AND a regular quilt!?! At the same time!? Yeah, I quickly realized that was unrealistic.

Also, I started by buying fat quarters. Then I did some math and realized that I would be able to make 42 hexagons out of each fat quarter. That is far more than I need from each fabric.

Thankfully, Joanne accepts returns if the fabric is unwashed and uncut. (yay!) Also, thankfully, Joanne's and the quilt shops around here will cut just a few inches off a bolt. And! And! People sell scrap packs on etsy!

Thanks to my down time at work, I have recently developed an obsession with etsy. It is so much fun to look through all the vintage staplers, handmade bags, old flour canisters, piggy banks that are really owls, and fabric. OH THE FABRIC.

Thanks to etsy, I am now aware of some awesome fabric designers.  Heather Ross is one of my favorites. She uses interesting color combinations, and her prints are filled with a great deal of whimsy! I love it! She has done fabrics with gnomes, tadpoles in jars, goldfish in bags, rapunzel in her tower, seahorses, mermaids, and abstract patterns. Unfortunately, I am not alone in my love for Heather Ross, and so her fabrics seem rather hard to find, and expensive. Just today I got in a scrap pack that advertised Heather Ross scraps. I plan on using every available inch of them.

Far, Far Away II by Heather Ross

Now that I have lots and lots of fabric, and all the supplies I need (for now anyway), it's time to start making things!

Step 1: Research

The first hexagon quilt I saw wasn't even finished yet and I still thought it looked really cute.  It was made by Stephanie @ sweetchrysanthemum.com.  I used to spend a good bit of time every day on the Pieces of Flair app on Facebook. I LOVED looking at all the designs people would make for their buttons and findin new ones. I would spend time every week or so rearranging my board and making new patterns, just enjoying the combination of colors and patterns.  The hexagon charm quilts reminded me of those.

Then one day I was bored at work. Right now I have two part-time jobs. One of them involves sitting at a computer for at least 20 hours a week. And there isn't always work to do for the entirety of those 20 hours. So I spend a lot of time on etsy and whatnot. And then I started researching hexagon quilts.
I googled.
I read. I looked at all the beautiful fabrics out there.

I. got. hooked.

I started visiting Joanne fabric and the multitude of quilt shops around the Seacoast NH. I couldn't find the paper hexagons anywhere, but one nice lady offered to order me some. They still haven't come in yet, but in the mean time, I found a template maker that can produce any size hexagon you need in a handy .pdf!

So. Here I am. Starting a new blog to document my new obsession.

In the beginning...

I recently finished my Ph.D.
Then I couldn't find a full time job.
Then I found a part-time job that doesn't keep me busy.
Combine that with all the extra emotional and physical energy I have because of my living situation and my completed dissertation and you get a girl who wants to work with her hands!

I've been seeing things about hexagons and English paper piecing around the interwebs, so I decided to give it a try.

welcome to my process blog!