flowerburst hexie progress

While out and about over the last week I got four new flowerburst hexie blocks finished. This is an ongoing project I started back in January, when I first fell in love with English paper piecing. I cranked out 50ish flowers to start with and then decided to add borders, which is a much slower process thanks to those little half-hexies.

Ever since then I've had a whole bunch of scraps cut up and ready to piece into more flowers and borders, kept in a cute little sewing kit ready for spontaneous drives and weekend getaways. It's my go-to project when I have nothing else prepared and I want something to sew on when I'm away from home.

Here's the whole batch so far. I usually post process pics to instagram while I'm working on them, although the turquoise on yellow one seemed to slip by undocumented.

This one and the next one I worked on last weekend while visiting Jon's parents. They love to sit out on the back porch and chat, which is the perfect opportunity for me to hand-piece.

I worked on this next one yesterday afternoon while riding in the car. You can see a bit of Lucy's fur over there on the bottom right. She's a total lap dog and a nut for car rides.

Last time I posted about these blocks I was having trouble calculating how many I'd need in order to make a queen size quilt. Helen, from over at Archie the Wonder Dog, suggested using this site, which tells me I'll need 184 full blocks and 14 half blocks, with the final quilt measuring 90x92 inches. So far I have 19 blocks and about 30 flowers...

Based on my progress so far I should have a finished top in roughly 4.5 years. Whoa. Talk about discouraging! Add in how long it would take to hand-quilt and I might just finish this one in time to cover up with at my funeral :P

I'm linking up with Quilt Story for a little Fabric Tuesday linky fun.

Rose Star block #2 + hexie flower hexies

This is my second attempt at a Rose Star block, you can find a tutorial by Clare here.

After finishing 45 hexie flowers I've decided on how I want to piece them together. I'm adding a border to each one so they finish as hexagons, 7 inches side to side.

After making three I wished I had used two similar colored prints for each background like I had with the flowers. I'm gonna do the rest like this and maybe I'll fix the first three later. Or maybe they'll blend right in and I won't have to!

I'm now realizing the amount of work I have ahead of me but hopefully I won't run out of steam :D

Linked up over at Quilt Story's Fabric Tuesday!

A little desert R&R + hexie progress

Spent the past week visiting my sister's family out in Phoenix. I met my newest niece (5 weeks) and spent lots of time bonding with her older sister (24 months).

The new big sis and I just loved playing with hexagons. She'd count their sides and chew on them and spread my neat little piles out all over the place. Great fun!

I cut and packed bunches of scrappy 2.5in squares so I could EPP to my heart's content while away from home base.

I even assembled a travel sewing kit complete with everything I needed for making 4 or 5 hexie flowers at a time. The nail clippers make for excellent thread snippers.

I made about 12 more while on vacation, bringing the completed flower count up to 43. I'm using these for the Scrap Attack QA.

Not bad, right? I stole moments to sew during nap time, plane or car rides and evenings spent in front of the tv after bonzos were in bed for the night.

It's back to the needle and thread for me!

Hexilicious!

Oh yeah!

Here's what I have so far and I like how it's shaping up so, so much.

So much that I expanded my fabric picks and acquired quite ambitious stacks of squares.

I'll keep going until I tucker out on hexies, at which point any leftover cuts will be ready to use for some other project down the road.

Linked up at Sew Many Ways and Quilt Story!