Oh, Look—A Hexie!

I am sure by now that some of my blog readers are convinced I have ADD. I don’t. What I DO have is an insatiable curiosity about a whole lot of stuff, and that is what gets me into trouble. I am also conscious of the fact that I do not want to suck the joy out of quilting by monetizing what I do. Part of why I got burned out on knitting was that I never had time to knit things I wanted to knit. I had locked myself into producing patterns on a regular (and rigorous) schedule, so anything I sat down to work on had to have future income-producing potential. I want to give myself permission to monkey around with other quilting projects when I feel like it.

A few years ago, I happened to go into one of the quilt stores in town when they were having a “garage sale.” I bought a large plastic zipper bag containing a whole bunch of Grandmother’s Flower Garden blocks, which are quilt blocks made of small hexagon-shaped pieces sewn together. The name and phone number of the quilter who started the project—Bertha—were still in the bag, along with some additional hexagons and a few pieces of material. I contemplated working on it, but that was early in my quilting journey and I didn’t feel up to the task of completing Bertha’s quilt. Everything went into a plastic bin for storage.

Last week, I got the niggling feeling that I should get that box out again and look at it. I know a lot more about English Paper Piecing now, which is the usual way of making Grandmother’s Flower Garden blocks. Small pieces of fabric get basted or glued around cardstock shapes, like hexagons. The individual shapes are sewn together and the pieces of cardstock are removed and re-used.

The universe must have been leading me down the garden path—no pun intended—because as I was perusing the wall of Accuquilt dies at the quilt store the other day, I saw that Accuquilt has dies for cutting both EPP templates and fabric pieces. They have a Qube for EPP, which contains dies for making many shapes beyond the traditional hexies, but I decided to start small and bought just the hexie die.

We have good supply of prayer shawls at church now, so I’m going to take a break from knitting. I am hoping to be traveling more this year (Alaska!) and would like to have some handwork projects to take along. My embroidery projects are hard to make portable because I need so many different threads. I am going to see how hexies work as my traveling handwork projects.

But back to Bertha’s quilt . . . the plastic bin contained a number of completed “flowers.” Some flowers had already been joined together using plain white hexies. The flowers themselves are made of truly vintage fabrics from the 1930s and 1940s. Unfortunately, the white fabrics are discolored and stained. Everything appears to have been hand cut and hand pieced, but without cardstock templates.

I was contemplating how to proceed, thinking that at the very least, I could make a bazillion white hexies, replace the discolored ones with new ones, and join the rest of the flowers together, when YouTube, which I had set to autopilot, decided to queue up a Missouri Star Quilt Company video about using vintage quilt blocks:

Jenny mentioned that she likes to buy old quilt blocks at antique stores. She had a whole pile of Grandmother’s Flower Garden blocks and decided to appliqué them to white background squares. Brilliant! That would be a much faster way to get these blocks into a finished quilt and honor all the hard work that Bertha put into making them.

I have 42 large Flower Garden blocks measuring 10” across and a dozen smaller ones measuring 8” across. The smaller ones still need to have the outer ring of hexies sewn to each other. The larger ones are complete. There are also a couple of smaller centers that don’t have the outer ring of hexies attached yet.

I pulled out a three-yard chunk of Kona White and cut a stack of 12-1/2” background squares. Jenny suggests attaching the blocks to the background square with fusible strips before appliquéing them. I set up the Janome to make a small blanket stitch edging and loaded it with white Aurifil 50wt. (A 60wt or even 100wt thread might be better, but I used what I had handy.) And before I knew it, I had six appliquéd blocks.

I’m not a purist. I will vote in favor of finished and usable before historical accuracy almost every time. Forty-two 12” blocks are going to make a nice-sized quilt, with or without sashing and cornerstones. Jenny notes that she takes an hour every morning to work on a “fun” project before starting her work sewing, so these will be my “fun” project. Everything I need is stacked in a bin next to the Janome.

And while I was cutting cardstock hexie templates on my Accuquilt cutter, it occurred to me that index cards would make excellent templates and fit easily onto the die. It just so happens that I have a box full of index cards with the names of azalea varieties on them. Grandma Milly was a quilter as well as a gardener—I have half a dozen of her quilts stored in the textile collection—and I think she would approve of that method of recycling them.

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I’ve got the binding attached to the Big Top quilt and have sewn about a third of it down. I should have that done by the end of the weekend. I also discovered that the quilt store in Spokane where I buy Signature thread has PDF inventory sheets on their website, so I printed them out and went through my collection of Signature thread to mark off what I already have. In the process, I discovered that I have a cone of light lavender, which is the color I want to use to quilt the purple and green quilt.

I am a bit concerned that the farm store still has no chicks. I was in there on Thursday. They have all the brooders and lamps out, and by now there should be chicks in at least some of them. The husband asked me if that was because the chicks were selling as soon as they arrived, but I don’t think the store is even getting shipments from the hatchery yet. (I have heard that some hatcheries won’t ship because the postal service is having so many issues and chicks were arriving dead.) Elysian was going to use my incubator, but when we took it out of storage, we discovered that the control module isn’t working. The manufacturer is sending me a replacement module because it’s still under warranty. She found another incubator.

I will hatch out my own chicks if I have to, but I’d prefer not to have to deal with all those juvenile roosters come fall.