Patchwork pieces

While we were walking round the shops sometime at the beginning of January (a while ago, I know), I found that Oxfam was selling packs of pre-cut patchwork pieces. They had two different options: a pack of 12 larger sized squares of sari fabric for £3.99, and a pack of 60 smaller squares of cotton fabric for £4.99. Both gave plenty of interesting patterns and a mix of colours, which I thought would look great in a quilt. 

Then, a couple of weekends ago, my wife's friend came around to borrow my sewing machine to make a patchwork quilt for her sister's birthday. This reminded me of the squares in Oxfam and so I sent my wife off the very next day to come back with a couple of packs for me; I didn't want to miss out on them!

We decided that it was more economical to buy the smaller sized squares as there were so many more in each pack, and that two packs would probably be adequate. Didn't want to go crazy, now. I figured that at £4.99 each they were quite a bargain and having enough fabric for the face of a quilt for under £10 was pretty good. Here are the packs that my wife came back with:

The first thing that both of us wanted to do was look through the different fabrics that were included, so here's a quick sample of those fabrics:

While I had just assumed that I would make a patchwork quilt using the pieces as the 11.5cm squares they came as, my wife then suggested that she might like a quilt made from hexagons. This then resulted in some researching on the web, resulting in me finding the traditional paper piecing method of making quilts. My wife thought they looked awesome, and I was becoming increasingly swayed (you know I like to try something new!). 

So, I was pretty much convinced on making a quilt using that method, but the next thing to decide was what size the hexagons would need to be. I managed to find a 'hexagon cutting guide' here, which allowed me to work out what size hexagon these squares would produce. Based on the squares being around 4.5" they would produce 2" hexagons. I then managed to find a printable for 2" hexagons here and laid one of the hexagons over a square to see how it would look. 

I decided that I thought these hexagons would be too large for the quilt, and had a think about whether I could use smaller hexagons without wasting too much fabric, as that would be no good! Dividing the square into four, I figured that I could get four 0.75" hexagons from each square of the fabric, so I went looking for a printable of hexagons that size. I found one here, and printed one of those out. These hexagons were significantly smaller than the first I printed, and seemed much cuter and more delicate. I laid four of these onto a patch:

The size of these hexagons definitely appealed to me more, although I'm aware that it would be four times as much work! So, I'm thinking that at some point (probably not in the too distant future) I'll start on making these patches into a traditionally paper pieced quilt. Here's looking forward to that!