I had all the tools at my disposal to get started on my Glorious Hexagon journey. Plus my six yards of the Feathers fabric had arrived. I wanted to start, but I was afraid to cut into that precious Feathers fabric. In order to get going I decided to simply jump in with something I had on hand. I had some of the Embracing Horses collection by Laurel Burch, which I had used awhile back to make some containers. I grabbed some yardage from the largest print and got to work. Here are the blocks I made:
#54 Kim.
The first block I tackled was #54 Kim. All three of the blocks above are Kim. The first month came with enough papers to make three of these Kim blocks. They are the simplest of the pieced hexagons, so I thought it would be a good place to start my journey. I was still a bit concerned about pinning layers for fabric for fussy cutting multiple layers so I did my fussy cutting by eyeballing the pattern. I posted these to the Glorious Hexagons Facebook Group and they were well received.
#6 Delores
The second block I tackled was #6 Delores. All three of the block immediately above are Delores. Delores offers the same level of simplicity as Kim, so it was a logical second choice for me. I like to ease myself into the waters of the unknown. Fussy cutting is definitely outside of my comfort level since I had never done it before. The rest of the blocks I have made so far are shown below in no particular order.
#2 Carol
#13 Judy
Judy appeals to me because it is actually a Grandmother’s Flower Garden piece with some diamonds added to flesh it out. The flower garden part is easy, but adding those diamonds I found to be difficult. It seems that the first edge goes on easily, but then the second edge inevitably needs to be stretched a bit in order to make it fit. That doesn’t make sense to me, but I am doing it anyway. My first Judy utilized a decorative portion of the large horsehead print featured in most of the blocks above. If you look carefully you can see the mouth of a horse along one of the edges of the hexagons on the outside of the flower. This block also utilized the horse mane fabric from the Delores block as well as a nice gold filler fabric.
#13 Judy
This rendition of Judy is my favorite block so far. This is the block that forced me to consider the orientation of my hexagons in the finished quilt. I made that decision before I cut the bird for the center. One thing I especially like about this block is the way the blue and yellow horses are both shown as upright on the top and bottom of the flower. This happens because the yellow heads orient one way towards the center while the blue heads orient the other way towards the center.
After making this block I noticed that one could create a one inch hexagon for the center using three of the diamonds utilized along the edge. This would be a good way to allow this block to have a circular symmetrical effect like that found in a kaleidoscope without needing to revert to a solid (or tone on tome filler) for the center of the block.
#19 Nicole
Nicole is a bitch. There are no two ways about it. This block is not easy to do. I used four different fabrics for Nicole. For the first star I used heads from the Jumping Horses fabric. I thought I had all five heads the same, but you can see that the lowest head is actually a different head. Next time I will be more careful. I used birds for the bottom star. For the left star I deliberately cut five different portions of heads from the large horse head print. The blue head nearly melts into the border, which is an interesting effect. I used the Horse Mane fabric for the border. I am not altogether happy with the way the border works, but I think that when the block comes together with others that I will like it more.
Ten hexagons are done of the 28 for the first month. The first month is January, so I am already quite a bit behind, but I will not allow myself to stress about that. I am enjoying this journey immensely, and I feel much more at home with this project than I do with The Farmer’s Wife Quilt which I took on primarily as a challenge to my EPP skills. What I discovered is that I can stitch just about anything using EPP, which is comforting. I also discovered though that there is something vaguely unsatisfying about using EPP for a project that could be more easily done with some other method. This project, on the other hand, demands EPP. I like that.
I think I will find a way to bring The Farmer’s Wife Quilt to her logical conclusion and put my greatest efforts into Glorious Hexagons for now. The challenge will be to not allow the Farmer’s Wife Quilt to become a UFO. Perhaps the best way to do that is to allow it to be a wall hanging. We’ll see.