EPP Hexie, progress report

Slowly but surely, the quilt grows. I didn’t bring the actual quilt on my trip, it is getting large and unwieldily  – even though it’s only about the size of a small baby quilt. What I did do was cut up a lot of paper and fabric on my Accuquilt, bagged them up  and sewed quite a few of them on the trip.

Once home I went right back to adding them to the quilt.I am being very mindful of color placement. I know quilters who just throw things together, willy nilly and their quilts look amazing. I am trying to balance to the colors, so they  are spread out over the quilt. Since I’m only a third of the way done, if that,  I still have a lot of room to work with.

One issue I’m having is the size of the fabric hexies.  When cutting by hand, I gave myself a lot of extra seam allowances. Although I cut many more of them on the die cutter, they have exactly 1/4″ seam allowances – which to be honest is very tight.Moving into the yellow and blue you can see the seam allowances are much smaller.  This does create a problem, less seam allowance means less stability of each patch.Here is a close-up, in some cases it almost looks like 1/8″.  No, I am not going back to cutting by hand. My whip stitches are very close together, so that should hold things in place. Also, I am going to do some kind of overall quilting, by machine! I will not be hand quilting this! The quilting will help hold things in place.I am also changing the paper/card stock I use. The colored card stock is lovely but it is slightly thicker than the mail card I cut up.  That tiny increment makes a difference when folding over the fabric.  So I am saving all magazine inserts, the ones that used to drive me crazy. As well as envelopes and other junk mail.  How’s that for really recycling and reusing!