A Prairie Home Quilts

For me, the urge to do some handwork always seems to be there bubbling under the surface. I even enjoy hand quilting but as I explained in a previous post I haven’t had the opportunity to do a lot of it while I was living with my mom.  At one time I thought I’d do some hand piecing to satisfy the urge.  I started basting the hexagons for this topper some time ago.  When I was sitting around while the computerized quilting system was doing its thing, I was usually either reading or basting hexagons–more reading then basting though or I’d have had more of this done. *smile*  When I started packing up my quilting room to get ready for my move to Oklahoma, I left out 4 projects that I could work on by hand in case it was a while before I could get my sewing machine back out. So now, here I am about 3 months later finally doing some more handwork.

I love the portability of my project.  And I’ve become totally obsessed with hexagons. So much so that I’ve totally changed my plan for the GFG quilt top that I am collecting fabrics for.  *smile*  Here’s the little bag that I’m using to hold all my stuff for the table topper.

This holds my needles, scissors, basting thread, hand quilting thread that I’m using to sew the hexagons together, and the sandwich baggies that are holding my basted hexagons (and some extra unbasted ones, too).

I was storing the fabric for my Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt top in a shoe box but then I bought this storage box at Walmart.

It’s actually a tackle box.

I haven’t started basting any of the fabric to hexagon templates for this project yet. Which is probably a good thing because I changed my mind on how I’m going to piece the top. I decided against the look of what we think of as the traditional Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt.

Here’s my progress on the table topper up to the point that I last took a picture–I think it was last weekend. I actually have five complete flowers done and a bit of the last two.

It’s gone faster than I thought it would. Soon I’ll be able to start hand quilting it!

This is my progress so far on the table topper — one complete go-around.

The fabrics are very blendey but I like it.  My quilt top will have a sort of blended look as well as I’m using a lot of muted tones and gray instead of white for in between the flowers.

You can see from the picture that a portion on the right and lower left do not lay completely flat.  Yes, accuracy counts in the cutting of your templates.  I tried to be as accurate as possible when cutting, but obviously I wasn’t accurate enough.  That’s why I’m using die cut templates on the quilt top when I get started with it.

While I was living with my mom, I knew there was never a chance that I could set up my hand quilting frame for the length of time it would take me to hand quilt something. My mom would never go for the living room being in “disarray” for that length of time. As a result, when I was looking for something to do by hand, I decided to get started on a Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt top that I’d been collecting fabrics for. Actually, I decided first to try my hand with a smaller project to see if I enjoyed it enough to hold my interest long enough to *complete* the GFG quilt top. I went to Walmart and purchased some inexpensive fabric for a smaller starter project. I’m making a table topper that’s basically a GFG flower of GFG flowers. (Make sense?)

I’m glad I started on the practice piece first as I’ve discovered a couple of things that will be helpful when for when I’m working on the GFG quilt top. Originally, I printed out templates on yellow cardstock and cut them out. Basically, I played around in MSWord with the hexagon shape until it was the size that I wanted — 3/4 inch. Then duplicated it as many times as I could on the page before I printed it out.  You can cut them out while you’re sitting in front of the TV.  Here’s what they look like.

3/4″ Hexagons. Yeah, they’re small. I like small.

I have all of the fabric hexagons I need for the table topper basted to the cardstock and one flower started.

Sorry about the graininess. ( I don’t know why that happens when I resize some photos of fabric & not others.  I’m no photographer. If you click on the photos, you can view a larger version that’s not so grainy.)

Here is the backside. You can remove the templates once your hexagon is completely surrounded. The three hexagons in the center have the templates removed.

Here’s a picture with the fabric I’m using for the next go-around.

Okay, so I’ve learned that the problem with basting *through* the paper or cardstock templates is that you have to *remove* all your basting stitches in order to remove the templates.  Not fun.  I found Sunshine Creations Tutorial on English Paper Piecing on the web and discovered there is a way to baste that doesn’t require you to remove the basting in order to remove the template because you don’t sew through the template.

One thing that I do differently is I don’t precut the fabric into a hexagon shape with the rotary cutter.  Too much fussing for me.  I think it’s easier to cut your fabric into a square and then just snip the fabric with scissors about 1/4″ away from the template once you have it pinned to your fabric.  Feel free to do what works for you.  *smile*  Also some people go all the way around the hexagon back to the starting point with their basting which is what I will probably do when I start basting for the quilt top.

One last thing. . . many of the die cut cardboard and plastic hexagon templates that you buy have a hole punched in the center for easier removal of the template.  I’ve now hole-punched all of my yellow cardstock templates.  I’ve also purchased some plastic templates but I’ll tell you more about them in a later post.