I’m making progress with my daughter’s purple quilt, bit by bit. That’s how most quilts proceed come to think of it!
My original plan was to do 15 hexagons by 15 rows to make it a queen sized quilt. I got it all put together and realized I’d messed up somewhere along the line. Some of the rows were actually 16 blocks long. Huh? Turns out that I had forgotten to account for the offset nature of hexagons. What I had was a quilt top that was 16 blocks long by 15 wide. No biggie, right? I decided to take it up to her (double) bed and see how it fit. It was more than long enough top to bottom but it didn’t have as much overhang on the sides as I would have liked for a true queen sized quilt.
Unlike all the other times I’ve gotten impatient and just gone ahead, I decided to learn from those mistakes and make another row so it is now 16 rows wide. It should be more than generously enough sized.
Now all that is left is squaring off the edges. I was counting the spaces to see how many half-hexagons I need to cut to fill in the gaps when I noticed something I really ought to have noticed before: only the top and bottom of the quilt will require half-hexagons. The two sides will require some sort of triangle – an angle of the hexagon. Hmmm… I sure hope there is a tutorial online for how to cut those accurately!
All in all, as fiddly as working with hexagons and inset seams can be, this hasn’t been too bad. No worse than sewing together all the fuzzy little pieces in a square quilt block can be – for as many blocks as you need to make up a large quilt top.
While I was constructing this top, I ran out of navy blue thread. I have oodles of thread so I was digging through my supplies to look for blue and found a huge stash of machine quilting thread. Since I’m not really a machine quilter I can only assume I had planned to teach myself a new skill at some point!
That sounds like a massive project! A QUEEN sized quilt!?! My non-mathematical brain would never be able to wrap around anything so large and so… logical! Can’t wait to see pictures of it. I bet your daughter will love it!
by susan February 28th, 2013 at 5:57 pmQueen sized is big but not so bad – I’ve mostly done big bed quilts. Just never done hexagons before
by Jenyfer February 28th, 2013 at 7:18 pm