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.

flowerburst hexie progress

I finished stitching up the last couple seams on this flowerburst hexie block last night. The sides of these blocks are finishing at about four inches. So let's see... if I want a finished queen sized-quilt, that would be roughly 24 blocks long and 22 blocks wide. Which would be a total of 528 blocks. WHAT?! Can that even be possible? Someone check my math and tell me I'm wrong, please.

flowerburst hexie

Nevermind, I just checked it myself and I definitely was wrong. No big surprise there! While the sides may be four inches, the diameter at their widest point is eight. That means 12 blocks long and 11 blocks wide, totaling 132 blocks. That sounds a LOT more doable. Just to be safe, go ahead and check that math for me, would ya? I don't have the best track record in regards to calculating quilt pattern dimensions.

FBH group shot

Here they all are together. I have 15 of them so far. Yikes, this may take a while! It's quite a bit of effort to get those little half-hexies basted and stitched in there, but I'm sticking with it because I think they look pretty cool this way.

leaning tower of hexies

There's no deadline in mind, obviously. I tend to have a hard time with those, have you noticed?! It'll be years, for sure. I think there are about 35 hexie flowers waiting for borders. This project has it's own plastic storage box that is handy for grabbing to take along on car rides, so I'll be bringing it with me this week for all the Fourth of July traveling we have planned :D


Linking up with Jenna over at her Manic Monday linky party!