Flower Hexagon Mini Quilt

I had quite a few moments over the weekend when I squeezed in little bits of hand sewing, so I thought I'd show you where I'm up to with my mini flower hexagon quilt (started here).

I got all the hexagons sewn together, and now have a huge amount of respect for anyone who makes an entire quilt this way! Once they were all secure I removed the paper hexagons.





Here's the reverse

  

Today I started on the quilting side of it. First off I cut out a piece of old wool blanket for the middle.

I cut this slightly smaller because I'm not planning on binding this quilt, so I wanted to be sure the white didn't show through between the outer 2 layers once it's finished.

Obviously it's perfectly possible to bind a hexie quilt, but because of the shape it would be much more fiddly than usual, whichever way I did it. I think my favourite way I've seen of doing it is like this:



On pinterest here

  
But, since this is a mini quilt destined to hang on the wall, the back is never going to show. So doing something like that seems a bit over the top to me. And since the hexies all have a 'hem' turned under from the paper piecing already, I thought I'd be lazy and just use a piece of wool for the backing and sew the layers together very carefully around the edge. If it looks rubbish I'll have to have a quick rethink!

Anyway back to the quilting. Next up I cut out my backing from a piece of a good, yellow wool blanket.

You might notice there's a slight gap on one side of one hexie. I'd like to say this is deliberate, or even perhaps that Maria decided she'd help me and snipped it off, but neither would be true.

I'm not quite sure what happened, one second it was going to be the exact size and then the next I'd stupidly chopped the wrong bit! But, as I said, the back is never going to show, and I really couldn't be bothered to cut another piece out from the start - I'm very lazy! So I decided once I've finished it I'll put something on that patch which will also work as a way of hanging it up - no idea what yet mind you!

So, again, back to the quilting. I really like quilting mini quilts because they're so much easier to manoeuvre through the sewing machine (given their small size obviously), so I always feel much more confident about trying something a bit more interesting and detailed than I might usually. I decided I'd quilt mini flowers in each of the hexagons. I drew my petal shapes in first (water soluble pen at the ready).

And then they were quite straightforward to machine sew.

Here's the first one done:

But that's as far as I got today I'm afraid, 18 more to go, and then a quote to add.

I've got a bit of child free time tomorrow, so I'm hoping to crack on with Theo's quilt. If only it were as easy to quilt as this one!

Sally.