New Project - Hen Party

Today is my mom's 75th birthday!  Part of the reason my blog posts have been scarce recently is because I've been secretly working on her birthday present.  It's a lap quilt, although once the borders are added it will be up to 70" square.  Here's the centre:

I wanted to get the whole top done before today, but I didn't quite make it.  The borders are done but not sewn on.  I hope to get it all assembled by the end of the week.  I make no promises on when it will be quilted...

I got the idea for the quilt from a pattern in the last issue of Sew Scrappy magazine, which I reviewed back in January.  I have modified it so much that I think you can call the design original now.

The quilt in the magazine used 8" snowball blocks, but when I looked at the scale of my fabrics I thought that 6" blocks would be better.  You can see that the larger chickens are framed perfectly.  There was a LOT of fussy cutting!  Even the smaller chickens were fussy cut so that no heads were cut off, although there is one block where I couldn't avoid it.  I will try to do less of that in future!

My original plan was to do the corner triangles in black and white.  I worried though, that such a strong contrast might distract from the chickens, so I opted instead for brown and cream.  The contrast is still strong, but they blend quite well with the other fabrics.  So I am happy with that choice.

I'll show you the construction over the next few days, and hopefully by the end the top will be finished too!


Related Post:

Sew Scrappy Review

Hexagon Hiccup

The centre panel of my little wall quilt is finished:

But it's not going to stay this way!

My original plan was to square up this centre panel by sewing straight borders over the wobbly edges, and then applique the borders.  However, there was a problem with that.

As I described earlier, I have been basting and stitching the hexagons in one step and with one length of thread.  This works great and I still love this method.  The catch, though, is that you cannot remove the basting without unravelling the whole thing.  Why would I want to remove the basting?  Because I want to open out the seam allowances to attach the borders.

I could just sew over the folded seam allowances, but I think that will add a lot of bulk, especially along the top and bottom, which will interfere with the applique.

I was explaining my problem to my parents and showed them the work, and they were amazed that I wanted to cover up the nice shapes of the hexagons at the top and bottom.  I realized they were right!  I have already modified the original pattern, so why not keep the hexagons whole and applique the centre panel on top of the borders?

So the half hexagons in the corners are definitely history, and I am also considering removing all the halves along the sides.  Plus, this will be great practice for my Botanic Roses quilt, because I have already decided to applique the centre to the borders on that quilt.

The funny thing is that as soon as I started to fill in all the half hexagons along the sides, something felt wrong.  Now I feel back on track.  But I don't think I would have understood the problem until I went a ways down the wrong path.  Live and learn!