One of my favorite crafts to check out on flickr is quilting. It is easy to feel inspired by the many beautiful quilts and I found myself wanting to give a hexagon quilt a go.
Once the thought crossed my mind to try a hexagon quilt and I researched how they were made, the paper piecing/hand sewing aspect made me realize it was perhaps not the time to take on a long term quilting project.
But then I came across a blog post with a video showing how sew them together by machine! It seemed like it would be so much faster. Notice the "seemed" in that sentence...
In the comments someone left a link to a slightly different technique of machine sewing the hexagons together. This second technique seemed easier to me--though I can't really remember why now. So I decided to go with it.
So a few months ago I started to cut out 3" hexagons. A baby quilt seemed the best option for a trial run at the hexagon quilt.
Last week I finally finished cutting out 120 hexagons. These didn't take all that much time, but I ran out of the original yellow fabric I was going to use. It took a couple trips to different fabric stores to find just the right shade to replace the original.
Sewing together the pairs of hexagons, and then making rows of them, was not difficult and took little time.
The next step of sewing the rows together is where things slowed down a lot. It looks so easy in the diagram! But you can't just pin the entire row together, and have to sew one side of the hexagon, then turn to the next side. It took about 25-30 minutes to sew the first two rows (10 hexagons each) together.
Then I totally messed up the second set of rows:
Not sure what happened there, but it wasn't good. It sure went a lot faster though! Perhaps that was my first clue things weren't quite right.
So even though machine sewing these is not the time saver I thought it would be, it probably is still a bit faster than hand stitching the hexagons together. This technique is also great option for anyone who might have ruled out making a hexagon quilt because they find sewing by hand painful.
Here are my pairs of rows, minus the mangled one. I will pick it apart this weekend. Then I'll finish sewing my pairs of rows together until the top is done. Stay tuned...
