In the middle of March I shared a pretty English Paper Pieced quilt from the movie Me Before You. Hand-piecing hexies is the perfect way to pass the time when you have a spare moment and I knew this was a great project to have on-going for such times. I do like to plan though, even considering that this will be a scrappy quilt and fairly simple in design. I started the preparation now so it would be easy to jump in when I'm ready.
I re-organized my EPP kit so that all it contained were the essentials for on the go sewing. It includes a small pair of scissors, a needle threader, a compact magnetic pin holder and a couple of spare needles, and thread. I tossed in a few Wonder Clips to hold hexies together as I stitch, some thread wax, and an extra pair of glasses with a clip on light in case I'm piecing in the wee early hours of the morning and need a little more illumination.
The only other thing I need to take along are the hexies themselves. To avoid having to worry about trimming and basting the paper pieces while I'm away from my workshop I decided to pre-assemble the hexagons. I am working on one colour at a time, adding the completed shapes to a narrow 'level' of a Snap tote case. I'm raiding the stash buckets and adding scraps as I find them. I estimated I'd need around 99 complete flowers, approximately 10 of each colour, each with 7 petals so a starting point of 70 hexies or so of each shade (don't do the math, it's all just a rough guess for now as I lack fabric in certain colour families). That takes a bit of time! I am gluing the fabric to the paper templates (so much faster than thread basting) and working on them while I watch t.v. so it's not quite so tedious. I have finished orange, yellow, and purple. It's quite satisfying to have a zillion hexies ready to sew but overwhelming at the same time. All this work doesn't even include the white background/joining pieces so I'll probably be sewing this quilt for a number of years!
At least I made the fabric cutting process a little quicker by using my rotating cutting mat and the Add-a-Quarter ruler. I thought I was making speedy progress but when I switched out to my regular quilting ruler it was actually faster. Now I'm in a rhythm of production line assembly and it feels very efficient as I toss them in the tote. When my hands start to cramp from gluing and folding I switch to hand-stitching the binding on my quilts. I have finished the circle quilt and now have the Piece of Cake {2} to work on. Then it's labels, washing, and there are another two quilts to add to the stack!
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