Hexagon preparation

As mentioned here, I have been working on a paper pieced hexagon quilt. I have found the beginning stages a little tedious, and it took far longer than I expected to cut out 480 little hexagons. However, this has now all been done and the next step was to add fabric to each of these hexagons.

Here is a quick outline of the process I followed for turning the 11.5cm square pieces of cotton into the 7/8" hexagons.

I firstly cut each of the cotton squares into quarters.

Next, I folded one of the fabric squares around two edges of a hexagon, making sure to make the creases good and crisp, and pinched them firmly at the point. I then pushed my tacking thread through the fabric and paper near to that point, before making a small stitch to secure itself.

I continued around to the next point of the hexagon, folding firmly over the edge and securing with the thread. 

This process was continued until I had folded over each of the six edges of my hexagon, and I secured the thread with a small stitch on the wrong side of the hexagon, going through both layers of fabric.

This process left me with one small fabric-covered hexagon, all ready for sewing together to make my quilt top.

As it turned out, there were not 60 squares of fabric in each of the packs I had bought. Instead, I was missing around 12 of the squares I thought there would be, and one of the squares was missing some fabric, meaning I could only get two hexagons from it. This therefore meant I was approximately 50 hexagons shy of where I thought I'd be, but that should still be fine for the design I have intended for my quilt.

Here are around half of the prepared hexagons, just to give an idea of some of the fabrics that will be going into my quilt top.

Now that I've finished adding all of the fabric to my hexagons, I'm ready to start sewing them together, and I really am rather excited about that!

All sewn up

You may recall that back in May of last year, I laid out the Birthday Blanket (as blogged about here) and began the rather large job of sewing all 121 squares together. Yesterday I finally completed that task and gave the finished thing to my wife. She was rather surprised as she had no idea I'd recently been sewing together the last couple of rows, but loved the finished product. 

I know you're wanting to see the blanket now, so here's a photo of it on our double bed (to give you an idea of size):

After all that hard work (and time), laying the blanket out on the bed was very satisfying for me. It was also the first time I really knew the size of the blanket. Upon finding this out, I realised that although the blanket is wide enough for a double bed, it's not quite long enough. This may not be a problem at all, depending on whether we use this blanket as a bed blanket, or as a throw for use on the sofa. It's therefore possible that this blanket still isn't finished! I may yet add a couple of rows to make the blanket that little bit more bed-sized and it's still possible that I'll add a border of some kind, just to finish off the edges.

But, for now at least, this blanket is finished, a year and four months after I started making it!

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!

Adventures into blocking

I learned to knit when I was a child, I don't remember how old exactly, but probably somewhere between 7 and 11. Then I did a little knitting at 17 as part of a school textiles project before putting down my needles until three years ago when I started knitting 'properly'.

I have, however, never blocked anything. 

But, with the Birthday Blanket being my main knitting project (currently, at least) I thought it important that it was done right, which means learning how to block!

This was today's task:

First, I made a 15cm square template out of card to make a masking-tape grid on the bed. I figured this would make it easier to make sure the squares were all blocked to the same size, and I'd be able to reuse the grid as many times as I needed to get all the squares blocked (there are currently 65 knitted).

I then ran some lukewarm water in the bathroom sink, and put in two squares (I wanted to start small).

After letting them soak for 25 minutes, I took the squares out of the water, squeezed as much as I could out of them and then rolled them in a towel.

Then, I blocked them onto the bed, using my grid :)

This all seemed to go fine, so I put more squares in to soak and repeated the process in small batches until I ran out of pins. 

Apparently I can block 15 squares at once.

Now, just to let them dry so that the other squares can get blocked!