Here are the first blooms of the "garden". I had to use the platter under the brown ones so you could see them.
The basting threads will remain until the whole top is put together. I also haven't taken the time to press them yet, since they're traveling with me in a ziploc bag. For the most part, they're maintaining their shape via the freezer paper I'm using for stabilizer.
It's odd how the colors are different from pic to pic. I didn't really notice it until I looked at the table in the background. The photo on top (the blue flower) is most true. These were taken on my phone. I'm rarely happy with those pix. But, hey, it's serviceable and it's what I've got. It's also the easiest way to get the pix online.
Now that I'm looking at the two directly above, I'm thinking I should have put more thought into how I was laying out the pieces. I've been literally picking them up and stitching them together. I've put them in sets of petals and centers and safety pinned them in their little flower groups, but that's as far as the "planning" has gone. Anyway, in the bottom photo, there are three petals where the stripes are going the same way and the other three are haphazard. If I'm feeling extra ambitious when all the flowers are completed, I'll go back and fix this (and any others there will most likely be as I'm looking at these, and knowing how I am about such things).
Again, the ones with the blue petals seem to come out with the truest color.
The green one above is "in progress".
Here's the backside of one. I chose freezer paper, since it's a really inexpensive alternative to specially made fabric stabilizers and is available in most grocery stores. It's also temporary. If you're unfamiliar with it, it has one waxy side, which can be ironed on to the wrong side of your fabric, stabilizing it for sewing. Once your seam allowances are basted, it'll stay in place, even when the wax is no longer holding. The wax is minimal enough that it doesn't leave a residue, and if you get it in the wrong position, it is easily removed and relocated. Once the quilt top is complete, I'll remove all the basting stitches and the papers.
To make the paper hexes, I read how one quilter had her husband make a CAD drawing of hexagons put together like a honeycomb. Then she'd tape her freezer paper to a regular sheet of printer paper and send it through the printer and cut out the pieces. Since my husband is not a CAD draftsman, I tried making a jpeg from some hexagon images I found online, but in order to get the right size, I had to futz around with the scale and I ended up using a lot of ink. The dimensions on the screen just didn't match what came out on the paper. I did get a few to work, but, frankly, it was a huge pain in the @$$, between the cutting and the taping and the this and the that, and the schmachta... so I scrapped that idea. Instead, I used one of my nested hexagon templates which was about 1/4 inch smaller than the size of the fabric pieces and good ol' Sharpie pen to draw on a nice, large sheet of the freezer paper. Cutting them out was a breeze, and, dare I say it, kind of fun!
I used the pages I had printed with the wrong size hexes (just on regular paper, I didn't want to waste the freezer paper while I was messing with the sizes) for trying out color combinations. Yes, I have a huge crayon selection. Don't judge.
It's a bit blurry, but here's a close up of the one I'm currently working on. The white threads are the basting stitches and the pink lines are the connecting stitches. I'm stitching them in the same way I learned from the quilter with the drafting husband. The stitches are pretty wee, but I want this sucker to last forever, so it can be passed down for generations. This is also why I may not actually take the time to undo the one that has the brown stripes. Those teensy stitches won't be fun to take out.
I'm starting to run out of the original set of fabric hexes I purchased in a kit. I thought about getting another kit, since I really hated the idea of cutting out all those fabric hexes, but then I thought, no, I don't want this to just be made from some kit. I'll suck it up and cut out more hexes. I got some fat quarters that went pretty well with the fabric in the kit, used one of the kit pieces to make a template, since they are a different size from any in my set of nested hexagon templates. In fact, I used one of the cardboard pieces from a fat quarter packet to make the template. I now have enough for the quilt without it looking like it came from a kit. It'll have my personal stamp on it now. Frankly, I only chose the kit I got because I wanted to try to put together hexes by hand. I had a trip to go on and wanted something creative to take along, but I didn't have enough time to cut out a ton of pieces before we left. It's just a lucky break that my niece is having a baby girl and I can actually pass it along. Knowing that makes this process so much more fun, and has given me the impetus to be even more creative with it and git 'er done.
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